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I've hit upon a hypothetical moral dilemma that will be central to the story I'm working on, but because my own viewpoint is rather odd and painfully uninformed in some respects, I'm posing it to all you guys to gather ideas. So please, give me your thoughts, whatever they may be... gosh I hope this isn't cheating.
What if it became possible for scientists to genetically engineer a real, living, breathing shapeshifter: a creature who contained the code for both human and another animal, and could switch between the two forms at will? Disregarding the outrageous improbability of this ever happening, what if it actually did? What would be the moral ramifications of creating such a creature? What would it mean to mankind? What would it mean to the world at large? What would it mean to the creature itsself? How might people react? What problems could occur? What would possible solutions be? Should it even be done at all?
I've already devised the reasons why this bizarre circumstance would occur, but I'm not going to put them here because I want to see what y'all pull out of this without that extra slant on things.
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Hmmm… A couple of thoughts right off the top of my head…
I’d say the reaction is going to run between fear and wonder.
Somewhere in the scientific community this would be embraced. Curiosity, ego, hubris, or simply the challenge could drive the research. What reason drive’s you scientist is going to greatly affect the life the shapeshifter is going to have (assuming the scientist can maintain some control given government, media, public opinion, etc.).
If your setting contains a fundamentalist type religious group, the idea of altering the divinely created form of mankind will be an abomination. Included in that, and as a more generalized public reaction, is the shapeshifter a person or an animal? That line has been blurred. Animals don’t exactly get the same sort of treatment in our society as a person – Is this aspect going to make the shapeshifter a second or third class citizen? Is the shapeshifter a scientific prize, shuttled about from lecture to lecture, or allowed to build a private life? Can it build a private life if its identity is made public? I think that would be highly doubtful if your setting has anything like our current media.
I would think the point of “should do it” become pretty moot once the shapeshifter is standing about, staring folk in the face. Should it happen again and what roles/rights do we give this new lifeform would become more pressing issues.
Maybe looking at the various sides arguing about cloning issues would be a start to looking at all the different viewpoints out there. It’s a situation with a lot of parallels.
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Well, the first thing to confront is that what you are talking about doing is far more difficult than an ordinary genetic engineering project, by several orders of magnitude more difficult than simply using different types of animal genes to enhance the physical abilities of a single animal species (which is itself orders of magnitude more difficult than doing the same to a plant species, our current level of genetic engineering).
So well before it becomes anywhere near possible to genetically engineer a shapeshifter, genetic engineering will have to progress to the point where hyridized humans are already a commonplace. It would just be something that the regular citizen would be familiar with as a matter of course.
Which, of course, means that this particular specimen would just be seen as a more technologically advanced version of what had already been done
Survivor- You're working from the assumption that the research leading up through these various orders of magnitude to a true shapeshifter would have been both legal and public. What if they weren't?
Cosmi- Good question. What effect would the various possibilities have? If you factored in the belief in every creature having a soul, and that soul determining much of the activity that takes place in the brain's higher functions, how much would it matter?
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I am curious about how long it would take this "shapeshifter" to shift from one animal to another.
From the little biology I understand, once a cell is doing a particular function, you can't really change it. So for this creature to change from one form to another would require nearly a complete new set of cells.
For some cells, this would not be so hard. We loose all of our skin cells--what, every month or so? (Can't remember the exact time.) But for others, like our bones, they last for years, I believe. And our teeth are set for a lifetime.
So I would think that changing from one form to another would require a few weeks, if not months (depending on how quickly he could convert the cells in his body and how much food was available). And even then, what state would he be in? Would his muscles be fully developed? Would his bones be strong enough (since they weren't built up by use, like normal bones)? And don't forget it takes time for hair to grow!
I wonder how useful such a transformation would be.
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AndrewR is right about this being more complex than just combining the genetic codes for two different species. I've made the same point in the previous discussion of DNA.
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
I'm well aware of that, and have spent the last good year coming up with ideas of how a true shapeshifter might be able to be made, and to function realistically and efficiently all at the same time. If I wasn't able to justify a creature that could switch between the two fairly expediently, I wouldn't have much of a story, would I?
However, being that I have gone over all of this before, I would very much like to focus on the societal and moral issues that an event like this would bring up, as was the thrust of my original post on the topic. I would very much appreciate some more imput.
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Well, as I've said before, reaching a shapeshifter would take decades of experimentation with macrogenetic alteration. It would require several order of magnitude advances in our understanding of how to control gene expression, how to use genetic alteration to produce phenotypic variations, entirely new physiological models, and a whole host of other problems.
And that amount of science cannot be done in secret. It needs to be advanced by the scientific community as a whole. And it requires experimental work. Lots of experimental work. Which means that, legal or not, this would already have to be something well known in society at large for a number of decades before you could ever develope a genetically engineered shapeshifter.
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If it takes so long to shift why does Lon Chaney Jr. do it so quickly in the Werewolf stories? The shape shifting scene in Werewolf of London takes just a few minutes and is awesome!
Posts: 173 | Registered: Dec 2002
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Well, the first answer to your question, Marianne, is that they were using special effects to show Lon Chaney's transformation.
The second answer (pertaining to the world depicted in the movie) is that Lon Chaney was transforming by magic, and not by scientific means.
A scientifically correct transformation would take longer, as has been discussed. A magic transformation can go as quickly as the magic needs it to go.
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Having said the above, however, I find myself intrigued by the idea of a slow, scientifically correct transformation.
I think the slowness of such a transformation has its own challenges, and would like to point out that there might be a story in that kind of shapeshifting as well. (Even if it doesn't pertain directly to what Shasta has been asking about.)
As for Shasta's question, if the shapeshifting isn't something people are ready to think about because of other scientific advances leading up to it, my first thought would be that people would not believe it--denial is a powerful thing--and my second thought would be that they would be more likely to accept it if it became a kind of fashion statement. If a movie star or two were to be able to do it, and thereby make it "sexy," then there would be plenty of other people (trend followers) who would also want to be able to do it.
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Survivor is right. Science takes a lot of work, and it's simply not done by mad scientists in secret laboratoeries anymore.
Of course, a good bit of fiction could take advantage of that. Look what Chriton did with Jurassic Park. One would expect the world's leading dinosaur experts to be aware of efforts to clone dinosaurs, yet the scientists are totally shocked to see what has been accomplished. The cloning is fiction, albiet credible fiction, so Chriton can set up an elaborate means to produce it.
I do see merit to this story, and I hope you pursue it. Consider the metaphor of the shapeshifter and reincarnation; the Hindu belief that death is a transformation into another forms prevents them from eating beef. Might this concrete demonstration of the closeness of all animal specias cause the world to suddenly become vegetarians?
Perhaps the ability of an animal to change forms cause a world-wide identity crisis. After all, we get more than our position on the food chain from our self identity as humans.
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