Should we allow research using human-animal hybrid embryos?

One year ago, the first licenses for research on human-animal hybrid embryos were granted. Should they be extended?

Ethicists like to talk about something called the “yuck factor” when they discuss the impact of biotechnology. It is a measure of just how unnatural and upsetting any scientific procedure seems. And the construction of human-animal hybrid embryos pushes the yuck factor right up to the limit. No one seems to have minded when the experiments which produced Dolly the sheep also produced curious hybrids of sheep and goats where the adult animal was a mosaic of cells from two different species. But scientists doing the same to humans has seemed strange and terrible ever since HG Wells first imagined it the Island of Dr Moreau. So what are the possible benefits, and are there grounds for our revulsion? (continua)

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Protesters outside parliament on the first day of the report stage of the human fertilisation and embryology bill in the UK House of Lords, January 2008. Photograph: Andrew Parsons/PA Wire