Henry talks about some typical journalistic scare-mongering.
Now I'm not a developmental biologist, so I'm just basing my opinion on what I remember from seminars and distant lectures. Having said that, the article is an an interesting read, especially seeing as the question 'what does it mean to be human?' is closely related to 'what does it mean to be made in God's image?'.
What the article fails to point out is that it takes much more than using the same bricks to make the same house. From a strictly biological viewpoint the developmental environment has more to do with what makes us human than where the cells actually come from. The environment of the womb, and the other cells in the blastula, are what drive the *organization* that makes human beings. To put it crudely, the genes do not win in development. It is the position that those genes find themselves in that leads to the animal. Nurture triumphs over nature. And, after all, the consciousness and intellect of humans appear to reside in the morphological structure of the human brain rather than being limited to the individual cells and connections between them.
The danger in this kind of scare-mongering is that it will prevent research into growing artificial organs for transplants, in much the same way that a failure to understand the issues means that the country with the most research funding in the world has been prevented from working effectively on cures for neurological diseases. This might be good for Europe but is bad for science in general. It is all the more sad because, really, the prospect of a mouse with the ability to compose music and argue for its own right to life is a long, long way off.
On the other hand, if you could transplant a grown human brain into say, a chimpanzee, then you would have a chimera worthy of Greek mythology.
