Informant38

Concoctions included the huMouse, a mixture of man and mouse; the humanzee, a cross between a human and chimpanzee; and blends of human with pig and human with baboon. The chimeras�named after the mythical Greek monster with a goat's body, a lion's head, and a serpent's tail�could potentially be used to study embryonic development, raise organs for transplants, or test new drugs.

The chimeras' real purpose, however, is their shock value. If the notion of human-ape half-breeds rising from the laboratory makes your stomach churn and your mind reel, then the monsters are serving their creator's subversive goals. Newman is both a developmental biologist and a founding member of the Council for Responsible Genetics, one of the nation's oldest biotechnology watchdog groups, and he has been writing and lecturing about the ethical perils of genetic engineering since the late 1970s. Ten years ago, he got a call from the economist, rabble-rouser, and fellow biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin, who asked if Newman could come up with a genetically engineered invention that was technically feasible, scientifically useful, and "so disturbing that it would draw the public's attention to the possibilities of genetically engineering humans." It took a few years for all the pieces to come together; in December 1997, Newman and Rifkin jointly submitted their application to the patent office.
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{I just finished a half hour hunt for a concise rendering of Cordwainer Smith's 'underpeople'. while there's lots of stuff out there about him, nothing I found did more than glancingly mention what I think is a powerfully realistic depiction of genetically altered animals, bred 'up' to serve humanity, much like slaves were beaten and bound into doing. dogs with essentially human bodies and fur and soulful eyes and unbreakable loyalty and obedience, buffalo capable of half-ton burdens and speech, and the rejects, the unfinished, the incomplete, the wrong, huddled at the margins of complete control, in disused corners of the decaying perfection of a far-future metropolis. and the police swooping in on ornithopters, bird-genetics transformed into organic helicopter-like vehicles. and all as real as your imagination can make it. reading his name on the back of the Buffalo Springfield album in the 60's earned Neil Young my unswerving allegiance.}

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You're just in there and you're swimming and he trusts you to go along with him. And at the end of a sometimes 5000 word short story, you've been in the future and in a complex imaginative future with real characters and situations that will stretch your mind.. This is the kind of the kind of thing that I think science fiction was designed to do, and he was I think perhaps the ultimate of far future science fiction writers

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Neither man has any intention of actually making a chimera.