  According to the Moral Status Framework (Streiffer 2005), what is distinctively problematic about chimera research is the possibility that the introduction of human material would enhance an animal’s moral status to the level of a normal human adult without respecting the moral obligations entailed by that status. That is, such research might cause an animal, which would have had a comparatively low moral status, to instead have the moral status of a normal human adult, and yet the animal might continue to be treated in ways typical of animal research subjects and which would be profoundly unethical given its new moral status.