For those following this story, here's some interesting background on the roots of the controversy from a story I did in 2003 (scroll down to "moral outage" section).Excerpts:
In October 2000, the European Patent Office assured Greenpeace activists that it would never grant a patent on mixed-species embryos because they were considered an affront to "public order and morality."
A month later a researcher in Greenpeace's German office discovered that a patent had been already been granted for creation of a man-animal hybrid...
...An Australian company, Amrad, was granted the patent in 1999, which covers embryos containing cells from humans and from "mice, sheep, pigs, cattle, goats or fish." It was later sold to U.S. company Chemicon International, a provider of some of the basic material for the Chinese breakthrough. "
