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Chimera: a she-monster slouches toward science

Hank (Don't Call Me Henry) Greely, professor of law and of genetics at Stanford University, created a stir in the scientific world, not to mention in the zoological fraternity, when he told Sharon Begley of the Wall Street Journal, "The centaur has left the barn."

A centaur is the mythical beast dreamed up by the Greeks with the head and arms and torso of a man and the body and legs of a horse. It is one example of a chimera, best known as a fire-breathing she-monster mixing a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail that gave ancient Greek children nightmares. (It's always described as a "she-monster"; you never hear about chimerical "he-monsters.")

Because we'll be hearing more of chimeras, let's first get the pronunciation straight: it's ky-MEER-uh or ke-MAIR-uh (take your pick) and not SHIMM-a-ruh, which sounds like an activity of one's sister Kate.

Until recently, the word meant "crazy idea," expressed in dictionarese as "fanciful notion, departure from reality," or in current pooh-poohing, "bugaboo, scary illusion." Now, however, chimera's postmythic scientific meaning is coming to the fore: "a combination of tissues of different genetic origin," or as defined by Jamie Shreeve in a prescient Times magazine article last month, "an organism assembled out of living parts taken from more than one biological species." The old adjective chimerical is a modifier that goes to the early meaning of "figment of imagination"; the newer chimeric is applied to genetic manipulation.

What brought this into the public eye recently was an admonition to researchers by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences not to cross-breed species involving the human animal. This followed the rejection by the US Patent Office of an application for making a humanzee, a proposed mixture of chimpanzee and human being (a name evidently preferred to chimpanbeing). The headline over the Wall Street Journal article was "Now that Chimeras Exist, What if Some Turn Out Too Human?".

Medical researchers can have a serious purpose in implanting human cells in animals. For example, by using human cells to create a human immune system in a mouse, scientists can conduct experiments to enhance human immunity that would be unethical to try on human patients. The Stanford biologist Irving Weissman asked Greely's committee to come up with ethical guidelines for putting human nerve cells in a mouse brain to study diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's -- but without "humanizing" the mouse.

"You don't want a human brain in a mouse with a person saying, `Let me out,'" Greely says. In a Library of Congress presentation this month with Michael Gazzaniga, the Dartmouth professor who pioneered cognitive neuroscience and is the author of The Ethical Brain, Greely observed, "We care more about our brains and gonads than about our gallbladders."

I immoderated that discussion about neuroethics and had a chance afterward to ask Greely how he came to the choice of words in his catchy comment, "The centaur has left the barn." Wouldn't it have been more accurate to say "is out of the barn?"

"It's rooted in the old saying `the horse is out of the barn,' of course," the lawyer-geneticist-ethicist replied. "But to give it a modern feeling, I combined it with `Elvis has left the building.'" This guy knows how to fuse a chimeric phrase.

BIG WET KISS

Early in March, Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, proclaimed US President George W. Bush's Social Security ideas to be "a big wet kiss to Wall Street." A couple of months later, when Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, suggested what he considered a filibuster compromise, the Senate's Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, picked up the derisive phrase and gave it a slightly broader ideological scope: he called the Republican proposal "a big wet kiss to the far right."

I have been following this popular phrase closely (it's had more than 27,000 citations since Google started counting it) because of an interest in "emoticons," a word coined in 1987. These punctupix use combinations of keyboard symbols -- asterisks, directional carets, hyphens, pound signs and the curvaceous tilde -- to signify emotional states. That symbol-art is more creative than simple initialese, like HAND for "have a nice day" or LOL for "laughing out loud." (I am not so scornful of the secretive POS, which means "ignore this message, or be most circumspect in your reply"; POS stands for "parent over shoulder").

The gradations of osculation include the soul kiss, also called the French kiss, in which the tongue is inserted into the partner's mouth (leading to the term tonsil hockey). There is also the butterfly kiss, seductively fluttering the eyelashes against the partner's cheek; the upside-down kiss, which should be self-explanatory; the passionate neck nuzzle, resulting in a bruise called a "hickey" or "love bite" and necessitating the wearing of a scarf for days; the air kiss, often blown by a "walker," in which no physical contact is made; and the enthusiastic, juicy eyesucker, which I used to dutifully receive from my beloved grandma.

A big wet kiss, however, is not a real kiss at all. The meaning of the phrase is "fulsome praise," in its precise definition of "lavish, excessive, immoderate, overweening." In its political usage, the attack phase is intended to leave the recipient with a big red hickey.
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