Do we really have to 'mankey' about?

Hanuman kasam, a US-Chinese team of scientists has created the world’s first human-monkey embryo. The project — which feels like the origin story of a Spider-Man villain, Rhesusman — involved injecting human stem cells into macaque embryos to create a hybrid that could be used for experiments, or as potential organ donors. So, if inserted into a monkey uterus, theoretically, the part-human lifeform — chimera, after the Greek mythological half-lion, half-goat and a snake’s head as tail — will have cells from both a monkey and a human. Sounds more like the origin story of Pierre Boulle’s 1963 French novel Planet of the Apes that was later made into an American movie franchise.

However, unlike Lewis Carroll’s half-lion, half-eagle gryphon, or Sukumar Ray’s hansjaru (duck+porcupine=duckupine), bokkochhop (stork+tortoise=stortoise) and other amalgams such as the half-giraffe, half-grasshopper and half-cow, half-rooster, the birth of the ‘mankey’ may pose ethical and legal implications. Similar petrifying hybrids previously cooked up in petri-dishes include human-pig and goat-sheep (geep), none of them so far appearing to have broken out from their straps à la Frankenstein’s monster. But with words like ‘Wuhan,’ ‘mutant’ and ‘biological’ now part of our collective horrorscape, monkeying about in the lab at this stage sounds a bit inhuman.