Amidst all the headache-inducing headlines about walls and taxes, a bit of science today: First human-pig ‘chimera’ created in milestone study.

Scientists have created a human-pig hybrid in a milestone study that raises the prospect of being able to grow human organs inside animals for use in transplants.

It marks the first time that embryos combining two large, distantly-related species have been produced. The creation of this so-called chimera – named after the cross-species beast of Greek mythology – has been hailed as a significant first step towards generating human hearts, livers and kidneys from scratch.

Relief aside of seeing scientific advancements in the news in a time when clowns are trying shut down scientific discussion, the article immediately reminded me of a novella I read earlier this week, Chimera by Gu Shi, originally published in Chinese in October 2015, and translated by S.Qiouyi and Ken Liu in March 2016.

Chimera is all about the question and ethics of human-animal hybrids, told first through the perspective of musician Evan Lee, and later his son, Tony. The key figure throughout is Evan’s ex-wife and Tony’s mother, a brilliant scientist who is never actually named but is variously described as calculating, a monster, or a child. There’s a parallel story of a murder on a space-ship whose passengers buy immortality, and woven through all, the image of a pig who has Tony’s eyes.

I really enjoyed this one. The English translation is efficient prose, and while the initial descriptions of mother-as-monster are heavy-handed, it falls away once the plot was established. There’s a particularly wrenching scene where the mother’s self-control cracks enough for her to confess that being pregnant is akin to hosting to a parasite, and later there are other hints at true feeling (or maybe they too are an act). The question of how much this woman cares for her family and creations is just as interesting as the whodunnit on Eden, the organ-farm spaceship, and both plots are enough to overlook the story’s weaker points—a red-herring presentation scene about the evolution of humankind, the increasingly pretentious quotes that begin each part—and follow the various threads through the ethical dilemmas to where everything eventually joins.

Back to today’s news: ‘[R]apid progress in chimera research had prompted a range of troubling questions, including whether the progeny would look more human or more pig, what would happen if a chimera had a human thought and whether it was possible for the human cells to cannibalise the pig embryo, resulting in a mostly-human, slightly-pig offspring. “These more fantastical possibilities are not a problem in reality.”’ For the time being, while the possibilities around chimeras are still just on the side of fantastic, Chimera is an engaging read (or listen) that I’ve found lingering in my head long after finishing.

Chimera was published in English in Clarkesworld Magazine March 2016, and can be read and/or listened to here.