Endowed by Their Creator?: The Future of Constitutional Personhood

Part I of this paper appears below. To download the full paper, click here. Presently, Irving Weissman, the director of Stanford University's Institute of Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine, is contemplating pushing the envelope of chimera research even further by producing human-mouse chimera whose brains would be composed of one hundred percent human cells. Weissman notes that the mice would be carefully watched: if they developed a mouse brain architecture, they would be used for research, but if they developed a human brain architecture or any hint of humanness, they would be killed. [1] Imagine two entities.Hal is a computer-based artificial...