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It was only recently discovered that brain cells aren't just present in the brain, but all over the body too. When people have organ donations from others, they sometimes experience weird changes in behaviour. This is now known to be a result of those brain cells being found everywhere rather than just the brain. So, it stands to reason then that mixing a human with an animal will produce similar issues. Will a person starting oinking if they are given a pig's bladder? I doubt it, in fact I think we've already had organ donations from animals. But still... Not a nice thought. Those occurrences often need a big, fat, [CITATION NEEDED]... at least the ones I've seen. In some cases, it is not reasonable to believe it's not the result of a placebo effect, which can be quite powerful. If you inject someone with something and tell them they should have a raised heart rate and start getting visual distortions soon, they often have those symptoms despite only being injected by saline. We have already had organ donations from animals... sheep and pigs, mostly, iirc. However, Ben appears to be talking about actual recodes of the human genetic code, not transplants of fully formed organs, which is different. We have the technology to make such things as glowing humans (glowing ghouls from Fallout, anyone?), although it's only been done on small test mammals, as well as fish, and has the chance of going bad ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GloFish and http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/01/0111_020111genmice.html ). We probably will soon be able to do a lot more than that. However, at the current stage of technology, we'd be modifying at the foetus level and even at the raw genetic material level... not on full grown creatures. To modify full grown creatures, you'd use a highly modified version of HIV to recode things... and you'd still have to wait for cells to die and be replaced with new ones, leading to potentially harmful, deadly, or painful intermediary stages if your modifications are larger than just, say, coding a glow in the dark gene into cancer cells using a highly targeted delivery system. This is also assuming you put in the right code snippet, there's no conflicts, and... the code makes sense... because we don't yet fully understand how the coding affects development. This is also not something you could ever do at home, at least, not for at least 200 years. It would require medical supervision, and a buttload of tests, and it's not like you could just code in so you replace human ears with mouse ears just for the heck of it.

Honestly, most attempts at changing DNA will result in cancer. You know how when you write a program, sometimes it won't work the first time? Well you can just keep trying. When you rewrite biological code, the "syntax error" is tumors and cancers. So if at first you don't succeed, you die a slow, cancerous death.

Somewhere, a biologist has spontaneously burst into tears and/or laughter.

I'll have a proper read of this later, but one thing stood out to me: It was only recently discovered that brain cells aren't just present in the brain, but all over the body too. When people have organ donations from others, they sometimes experience weird changes in behaviour. This is now known to be a result of those brain cells being found everywhere rather than just the brain. So, it stands to reason then that mixing a human with an animal will produce similar issues. Will a person starting oinking if they are given a pig's bladder? I doubt it, in fact I think we've already had organ donations from animals. But still... Not a nice thought.

The question isn't can it be done, it's should it be done, and I say no.