  Because the relevant baseline is the moral baseline, research in which a non-human animal’s moral status is enhanced to that of a normal human adult raises the following problem. The view institutionalized by animal research oversight committees is that almost any valid research objective justifies sacrificing even the most fundamental interests of non-human animals (Francione 1995). In contrast, the view institutionalized by human subjects research oversight committees is that humans have a moral status which provides them with substantial moral protections, including a very stringent prohibition on harmful research without informed consent. So long as experiments that involve the transplantation of human stem cells into non-human animals are overseen by animal research oversight committees, or by human subjects committees attentive only to concerns of those who provided the gametes or embryos from which the stem cells were derived, the wrong set of moral protections is likely to be afforded to status-enhanced chimeric research subjects. If the relevant baseline were the non-moral baseline, then transplants that enhanced moral status probably would be no more problematic than other kinds of biomedical research on animals.  But because the relevant baseline is the moral baseline, sacrificing the fundamental interests of the chimeric research subject as they would have been sacrificed in any other animal research is the moral equivalent of sacrificing the fundamental interests of a fully functional adult human being. In status-enhancing research, what would have been animal confinement, pain, suffering, and death, becomes the moral equivalent of—and, on an anthropocentric view, also becomes—human confinement, pain, suffering, and death. On all but the most extreme animal rights views, this makes status-enhancing chimeric research much worse than other biomedical research on animals, and on any plausible view, makes it absolutely unacceptable.