This blog post is cross-posted from the Spoonful of Medicine blog.

Rebecca Hersher

NEW YORK — Chimeras, part one species and part another, have a long and violent history in the world of art and religion. But the way society views the mythical creatures is changing, thanks in part to the advent of genetic engineering.

“If you look back at depictions of chimeras, it is clear that there have been changes in our relationship with the animal within us, whether we fear it or try to harness its power,” Robert Klitzman, a psychiatrist and bioethicist at Columbia University in New York, told Nature Medicine.

At a lecture here this week at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Klitzman argued that art reflects our changing attitudes toward the differences between humans and animals, a line which is increasingly being blurred by genetic technologies such as the creation of chimeric mice and monkeys for research.

Klitzman’s survey of artistic representations of chimeras began in ancient Egypt, when the duality of the gods was their most terrifying trait. For example, Anubis, god of the afterlife, had the head of a conniving jackal and the body of a man, and Sekhmet, the warrior goddess who carried out heavenly punishments on earth bore the head of a lion. By the time of the Greeks, the most famous chimera, the murderous sphinx, had evolved to have the haunches of a lion, the wings of an eagle, the tail of a serpent and the head of a woman.

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