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I can answer a few of those, studied bio in college. There's no memories/behaviors stored in DNA. No Assassin's Creed stuff going on there Other than hormones that flow around in the blood, all of your thoughts and personality are stored purely in the brain. Those are a LOT more complex than the DNA. Also, even though we can easily modify DNA itself, we can't just modify living organisms because we can't replace the DNA in each of the trillions of cells. Other than the random mutations that cause things like cancer, your DNA stays the same through your whole life, and your body is fairly good at recognizing and attacking any cells with "foreign" DNA (which is why organ transplants go wrong sometimes). The HIV method may work eventually, but it's kinda sloppy -- there's no way yet to ensure that it replaces the targeted DNA in every cell of the body, and only does it 1 time for each cell. GloFish and similar lab animals are actually a working example of this, though (and there's LOTS more). The scientists took a gene from jellyfish for a glowing protein (GFP) and inserted it into the fish DNA, then replaced the DNA of a fish embryo with the modified DNA. Other than needing a bit more energy to make the extra proteins, the fish are completely normal, since the GFP doesn't interfere with anything else. I've even done exactly the same thing with bacteria in 2 biology lab courses - they're just a lot easier to modify because they're single-celled, reproduce fast, and actually willingly assimilate foreign DNA, unlike pretty much any multi-celled organism. As for hybrids . . . the only species that could possibly hybridize with humans are bonobos, chimpanzees, and maybe gorillas. Maybe. In nature, there are hybrids of species that are farther apart from each other than we humans are from bonobos, so there's a chance, but should it be tried? I'd say probably no. Their brains would not develop like ours (that's where most of the differences are between human genome and ape genomes). And in the case of Chimpanzees, they're *extremely* violent, I don't think we should add any more to that. A russian scientist actually tried this once, unsuccessfully. Any other hybrid would definitely not be possible, for a lot of reasons. Different chromosome numbers would mean a hybrid cell can't even divide properly. Not having two copies of a gene (one from each parent) often makes it not function, and "equivalent" genes from different species aren't necessarily compatible. If you want to put genes from one organism into a different organism, you're gonna have to modify them to be compatible. The main reason for that: the protein that attaches to and "activates" DNA is species-specific -- it won't work with genes from another species unless we manually replace the binding site of the gene (the promoter) with the correct one. (Gah, wall of text...and that's maybe like a tenth of what I learned about this topic in college Any more questions?)

Somewhere, a chemist has spontaneously combusted.

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

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.