At last, Minotaurs!

[Molyneux]

I want my thousands of cow-man slaves.

Tough. All you're getting is the 'elephant/pig' hybrid and the monkey with four asses.

How about some nice stretch tentacles? Those always liven up a party.

[LordShaithis]

When I'm running things "awesomeness" will be considered a valid point in favor of any scientific project requesting funding from the government. Super-intelligent monkey butlers, here we come.

[Major Maxillary]

Screw minotaurs, I was real cowgirls!

[Darth Servo]

Screw minotaurs, I was real cowgirls!
<snip image>

Um, isn't having breasts AND an udder kinda redundant?

[Molyneux]

Screw minotaurs, I was real cowgirls!
<snip image>

Um, isn't having breasts AND an udder kinda redundant?

Obviously you have never found 4chan.

[sketerpot]

Well this is intersting to say the least, but personally i would like to see someone make a human/animal splice and let them grow to maturity in the name of science.

Zor

thats the part thats giving me shivers. Sure it'd be good for science, but back in the day it didn't even take .001% genetic difference to make you a slave. and even now things are only marginally better.

You do realize that it's FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE to make a human-cow hybrid by mixing the sperm from one with the egg of another, right? It's possible to very carefully transplant genes from one species to another, but that's just for little things, not making HUMAN-COW HYBRIDS.

Whenever something like this happens, there are always people waving their hands in the air and making up some bullshit about how this may undermine human rights, make us nothing more than animals, produce an army of slave-cow-men, et cetera. This happens for one or more of the following reasons:

1. These people don't know jack fucking shit about basic biology. Wankers.
2. They have the IQ of a poorly constructed rice pudding.
3. They're just scaremongering so they can keep their fancy jobs on Bioethics Panels.

As you may have surmised, this pisses me off. These embryos are not humans, they are collections of cells that can never mature, ever.

[ThatGuyFromThatPlace]

oh I understand that, but this technology is going somewhere. Sure we don't have cow people slaves and probably never will (Well, I'm hesitant to say never). But this technology is much deeper than that, as are Human Attitudes.
I'm not afraid of sentient Human/Cow hybrid slaves (not yet) I'm afraid of farking 'de-gene-erates' who are second class citizens because they haven't (or even have) been 'tweaked' before they were even multi-celled.
unless we get major changes in society before any 'genetic revolution' we're heading for a second civil rights crisis, only one side really will be superior this time around.

[sketerpot]

unless we get major changes in society before any 'genetic revolution' we're heading for a second civil rights crisis, only one side really will be superior this time around.

One side would be superior on average. High school teachers are smarter on average than elementary school teachers; does that mean that high school teachers should all be treated as superior to elementary school teachers? The answer is obviously no; there are really smart elementary school teachers and some abysmally stupid high school teachers.

People should be judged on who they are: their achievements, their abilities, and their character. I don't see this changing just because a bunch of people start being genetically enhanced.

[ThatGuyFromThatPlace]

oh definitely, thats the way people should be judged. But that just ain't the way it is out here in world real.

And the 'superior' side won't just be superior 'on average' when they're superior 'cause there mommies and daddies gave them the best genes money can buy. The only de-gene-erates that could match them would be those few naturally born with excellent genetics, but when people start getting good genes from outside the Human race, all bets are off.
Slavery happened simply because White people thought they were better than Africans, it took hundreds of years of education to make people realize there's no real difference one way or another, and some people still don't believe it, what do you think will happen when people are being born with pieces of paper that absolutely guarantee they are superior to base-line humanity?

[Vendetta]

All they're doing here is using bovine eggs as carriers, since they're mammalian and thus not that unlike our own (else it wouldn't work). They're certainly not making a cowman or huvine or what have you. The technical moniker of chimæra is very loose in this case (hell, we get human only forms of this effect in the same way we get identical twins).

Whilst the term is loosely applied, it is somewhat valid.

Although the genetic material in the egg cell is being replaced with human genetic material, some of the mitochondria of the egg cell will remain. Leaving an embryo which is technically human but with cow mitochondria. This is a bigger deal than you might think, because mitochondrial DNA has been implicated in some forms of hereditary disease. Quite what will happen when that mitochondrial DNA suddenly finds itself outside of it's original environment of a cow cell and in a human one is anyone's guess, but it's very likely that it will prove fatal for the embryo, at best it could lead to severe developmental abnormalities as cells may simply not function correctly. (That's the main ethical concern with this kind of research, more especially with cloning, the developmental failure rates are very high)

Tough. All you're getting is the 'elephant/pig' hybrid and the monkey with four asses.

No four assed monkeys, but sometimes you get two assed chickens.