Pigmalion

As if they didn’t have enough on their plate to worry them what with the FDA’s acceptance of RU-486, experts in medical ethics have discovered that a wild and crazy cloning team has managed to cross pig and human DNA.

We’re not making this up -- Jonathan Leake and Nick Fielding writing in the United Kingdom’s Sunday Times reveal that scientists have successfully produced an embryonic pig-human hybrid by inserting human DNA into pig cells. This is why young children should never be given a home chemistry set as a gift. You’ve seen what they can do with computers, sending stocks tumbling, hacking their way into top-secret stuff like KFC’s confidential herb and spice recipe. No sooner are they in their late teens than they get a government grant and this sort of pig-human katzenjammer thing occurs.

At this time, we are not sure of what happened to these porcine-homo embryos, because the researchers have dummied up upon submitting an application for a patent to the European Patent Office, says the Times. The usual rigamarole for securing a patent depends on whether the thing or idea is an entirely new concept or a demonstrable improvement on a pre-existing one.

What makes the medical ethics people nervous is the fact that the pending patent has a strong chance of being granted. Apparently European law says the scheme is not illegal because the embryo is not technically human. In the United States, the fine distinction between what is human and what is not has been blurred by several decades of punk rock, heavy metal, rap and hip-hop "music."

Obviously, God already holds a patent on pigs and humans, so it will be up to the applicants to prove that their clone is an improvement. Certainly the human is not going to improve the pig, but there is a good chance that the reverse might benefit us. It couldn’t hurt.

Dr. Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics is appalled. He insists, "This kind of research depends on devaluing human beings." We can all agree that human beings need no assistance from researchers; we can devalue ourselves very nicely on our own.

We have tracked down the perps in this caper. They turn out to be big players in the biotechnology industry, namely Stem Cell Sciences in Australia and Biotransplant in the United States. Even these guys don’t know for sure whether the hybrid embryos could have become living beings.

Ninety-seven percent of the DNA is in the nucleus, which was human. There would be 3 percent pig DNA, however, indicating that the end result would likely be more human than pig. Except for a tendency to shed its clothes and happily wallow in the mud, the hybrid clone might be indistinguishable from normal people, especially at male-dominated sporting events.

It is our hope that these scientists are not laughed out of the club and forced to go back to finding a cure for the common cold. As dentists, we can immediately see the advantage of combining human DNA with, say, that of a shark. Of all our various organs, none suffer such a deficit in engineering know-how as the human dentition.

Consider the shark, which in our opinion is good for nothing more than providing endlessly boring documentaries on public television depicting their feeding habits, mating proclivities, thirst for surfboarders, ad infinitum. This overexposed animal has been described as the perfect eating machine and for good reason. Shortchanged in the warm-and-fuzzy department, the Great White and the rest of his ilk have more than made up for the oversight by having the niftiest set of choppers you can imagine, including those of Julia Roberts.

If the lads in the biotechnology dodge ever get around to crossing a shark with human DNA, the game is up for dentists. Fillings, root canals, orthodontics, the lot --we’re out of business, because, as we all know, sharks keep growing new teeth and moving them forward in a never-ending cycle. That’s OK; when you get right down to it, poking around in other people’s mouths is hardly a dignified way for grown men and women to making a living anyway.