Real Life Dr. Moreau

In 1896, the granddaddy of sci-fi, H.G. Wells (Jules Verne?) wrote ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau‘.  Exactly 100 years later, Marlon Brando emerged from venerable retirement to disgrace himself badly in the film adaptation of the same name(he actually had squandered most of his dignity 6 years earlier – reprising his role as ‘The Godfather’ in the terrible film: ‘The Freshman‘). Why Brando chose this, having no doubt turned down various brilliant scripts over the years, is beyond me. The film is very, very terrible (the 1977 version isn’t much better) but the book threatens to become a reality.

The eponymous character is a demented doctor who performs experiments on live animals (vivsection was actually pretty common back in the day) and he essentially mixed species together to make half human, half, say, lion. The technology now exists to do that very thing. The ‘geep‘ is a chimera – a goat and sheep mixed together genetically. This is not the same as a Liger or Zonkey, which are hybrids – fertilizing an egg of a species with a sperm from another, this is the addition of cells from one species into the embryo of another. Transgenics have been used with bacteria and humans to produce insulin etc, but something on the scale of creating, say, a chimpanzee/human (himpanzee?) would be quite disturbing.

Human chimera-mosaicism is rare, but it occurs (all too familiarly in shows like SVU and CSI) where a twin ‘merges’ with the other and thus some of the organs/blood will have different chromosal make-up (genes are on the chromosome) for this reason, there have been court cases regarding paternity/maternity of children – as the DNA will not match up. One aspect of this I find particularly interesting is ‘somatic chimerism’ for example, the case of XX/XY  (only men have the ‘Y’ chromosome – so it’s a man/woman mix) chimeric-mosaicism. There have been cats that exhibit female behaviour (allowing itself to be mounted/not spraying) when the genitalia are unambiguously male (the males bought that it was a female), and then resume normality later on. This creates a case – which I’m sure has been explored – of ‘behavioural genes’.

We can’t know if the technology is there.  For all we know, technology exists now to take the genes for say, a horse’s musclature and insert them into a human embryo – or worse, to create a centaur-type beast by fusing the horse and human embryos together! Obviously, the majority of phenotypes would be hideously disfigured and wouldn’t survive full-term (have you seen Alien:Resurrection?) but it’s conceivable that you could have a human brain in a horse/man’s body.

Precedent has been set in the states with regards parents choosing a specifically ‘non-hearing’ embryo out of a selection because the couple were ‘non-hearing’. A British Judge ruled that the arbitrary selection of embryos could be justified by aquiescing to whatever ‘suited’ the mother. Suddenly, were staring designer children in the face.

Hopefully there isn’t going to be an MTV show where mothers are implanted with an interspeciated embryo, give birth to a monstrous abomanation only to be told : ‘You’ve been Moreau’d!’.