In sheep's clothing

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RENO, Nev.

If there was a human side to them, it was tucked deep inside and resisted all invitation to bonding.

The black olives of their eyes betrayed visceral distrust as the sheep huddled in the opposite corner of the corral, unsettled and apprehensive.

"Care for a leaf of lettuce, sisters?"

"Ba-a-a-a-ah," came a plaintive reply.

They looked like sheep, bleated like sheep and displayed behavior that was, in one word, sheepish. Yet there was no hiding from the fact that the fidgety animals in a corral on the eastern outskirts of town were, at least from a medical standpoint, partly human.

"They have human cells in their livers, pancreases, guts, hearts and muscles," said Dr. Esmail D. Zanjani, the white-haired chief biotechnologist at the University of Nevada-Reno and creator of the flock.

"About 10 percent of each of these organs are made of human cells. Their brains, by contrast, have very few."

It was the stuff of science fiction, a glance into a bottomless intellectual precipice that hid moral, ethical and political dilemmas beyond the immediate human grasp.

Baby boomers, who grew up mesmerized by a 19th-century novel by H.G. Wells about the brilliant and iconoclastic Dr. Moreau, who defiantly crossed animals with humans, now had a chance to greet real-life chimeras — mythical creatures from Greek folklore that displayed a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail.