Though you, like me, most probably live in Fayette County, it is just a short hop across the pond from Hartsfield-Jackson to London Heathrow or Gatwick. It is there in the UK that scientists from Newcastle University and Kings College, London have requested permission to create embryos by fusing human DNA with cow eggs.

If the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority gives the go-ahead, scientists would be allowed to insert human DNA into a cow’s egg which has had its genetic material removed and then be able to create an embryo by the same technique that produced the world-famous Dolly the Sheep.

BBC News Medical correspondent Fergus Walsh reported on Nov. 6 that the resulting embryo “would be 99.9 percent human, the only bovine element would be DNA outside the nucleus of the cell. It would though, technically be a chimera, part-human, part-animal.”

I derive pleasure by taking the back roads of Fayette County and seeing cows on the small farms that still remain here. For two years, I lived adjacent to a dairy farm in the Midlands of England. I particularly enjoyed observing the spring calves as they would bound out of their stalls to enjoy the delights of open fields. I never imagined that one day, in the name of scientific progress, such an horrific experiment might be allowed to take place in Great Britain.

You may or may not have cows on your patch of Fayette real estate. One thing is certain, however. If you did, you would have no problem differentiating between them and us. My fellow Fayette husbands, even if your spouses suffer from dreaded PMS (scientists named it that because “Mad Cow Disease” was already taken), you would still prefer to share hearth and home with a wife who was 100 percent woman.

Obviously, the researchers and scientists who are seeking to create these hybrid embryos are not hoping to develop “cow-people.” The embryos would quickly be used and then destroyed. They would be alive and developing for days, not weeks or months.

But if my memory serves me correctly, someone once said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” The Scriptures record that “God made the wild animals according to their kinds ... And God saw that it was good.”

The very next verses in Genesis read, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

After God finished his grand experiment of creation, he saw all that he had made, “and it was very good.” Now, certain UK scientists seek a new genesis, a re-creation fusing human kind with animal kind in a ghastly experiment that shows how far humankind has sunk, and is nothing less than yet another harbinger of the demise of Western civilization.

Bobkowski may be my last name, but let’s keep the cows out of our genes. I believe God would look upon our re-creation, and call it “very bad.”

David Bobkowski
Fayetteville, Ga.

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