Bad Ideas

Americans haven’t come to terms with their scientifically politicized reality.

One of the more disturbing outcomes of the late 2023 congressional investigation into the prevalence of antisemitism on America’s college and university campuses was the discovery of widespread plagiarism. No sooner was it clear that Harvard president Claudine Gay may have committed publishing piracy nearly 50 times over the course of her career when stories began breaking about the frequency of similar transgressions at Columbia, Brown, and elsewhere.

Yet as gravely as plagiarism is (or at least should be) treated within scholarly circles, its impact is typically limited to distorting a reader’s perception of who first expressed some important idea or observation, not the accuracy of the secretly copied material itself. It would be far more consequential if academics were either intentionally or unconsciously misrepresenting facts that could seriously mislead average citizens as well as compromise the usefulness of contemplated social programs. Unfortunately, this later intellectual sin is far more common than generally known.

Scientists’ progress toward creating chimeras raises major ethical questions.

Afew weeks ago, scientists reported successfully growing human cells in monkey embryos, paving the way for creating live human–monkey chimeras. For many, this could open the door to great medical advancements such as in organ transplantation. For others, it may be a sign that science has overstepped a moral and ethical boundary.

A chimera, in the ancient mythological sense, was a hybrid creature made up of a lion, a goat, and a snake and was the product of the mating of the giant serpent Typhon and his lover Echidna. In the modern biological sense, however, a chimera is a cluster of cells or a whole organism that contains distinct cell types from two or more different organisms.