Scientific Progress Goes Boink!

We live in amazing times. There are electric cars (or in some cases, mostly electric with gas engines just in case). There are food additives that allow us to avoid harmful side effects of the food additives that we used to get naturally. There are phones that can be carried from room to room and then left God-knows-where when the phone rings again. There are phones that can take pictures and video and play television signals and keep your appointment book and any one of a thousand other functions - if you're not picky about using them as a telephone. There are televisions that are so thin that you can have a sixty-inch wide one hanging on a wall in your one-bedroom apartment. Truly amazing times.
Scientists announced Monday that they had created mice with small amounts of human brain cells. Way to go, scientists! Most of the humans I know could spare a few brain cells anyway, so why not use them to sprout a race of super-intelligent rodents? "What're we gonna do today, Brain?" "The same thing we do every day: Try to take over the world."
The researchers created the mice by injecting about 100,000 human embryonic stem cells per mouse into the brains of 14-day-old rodent embryos. Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego said "This illustrate that injecting human stem cells into mouse brains doesn't restructure the brain." The mice were each born with about 0.1 percent of human cells in each of their heads, a trace amount that doesn't remotely come close to "humanizing" the rodents.
Well, that's just great. So much for the "Own your very own Stuart Little" marketing campaign. There is also a great deal of concern by some who envision nightmare scenarios in which a human mind might be trapped in an animal head. Where have these guys been? Didn't they watch "Manimal?"
Okay, so maybe that's not going to happen, but I just hope they ask the mice parents for consent first. We wouldn't want any nasty rodent/human lawsuits pending - and you can now feel free to insert your own rodent/lawyer joke here as appropriate.