AP: Evil Part-Human Sheep Lurk in Wait in Nevada

In what might be the silliest "here come the evil mutants" story of the year, Paul Elias, AP biotech writer returning from a field trip to Nevada, tries to extend the half life of the National Academies announcement (which we noted) of a new, proposed stem cell policy. He spins a tale guaranteed to produce at least one media cycle about part-human chimeras thinking hard out in the sheep fields, or wherever it is that sheep hang out:

On a farm about six miles outside this gambling town, Jason Chamberlain looks over a flock of about 50 smelly sheep, many of them possessing partially human livers, hearts, brains and other organs. The University of Nevada-Reno researcher talks matter-of-factly about his plans to euthanize one of the pregnant sheep in a nearby lab. He can't wait to examine the effects of the human cells he had injected into the fetus' brain about two months ago. "It's mice on a large scale," Chamberlain says with a shrug. As strange as his work may sound, it falls firmly within the new ethics guidelines the influential National Academies issued this past week for stem cell research.

The problem with these stories is that they are uncluttered by analysis about what chimeras really are, or about the ubiquity of chimeras in medicine today. Elias does note that "Doctors have transplanted pig valves into human hearts for years, and scientists have injected human cells into lab animals for even longer," but then immediately turns to say that "the biological co-mingling of animal and human is now evolving into even more exotic and unsettling mixes of species, evoking the Greek myth of the monstrous chimera, which was part lion, part goat and part serpent."

[thanks Ken Kuhl]