The Planet of the Apes film franchise has single-handedly shaped entire fields of biological research. As long as it remains in the public consciousness, no biologist or geneticist will ever experiment with trying to engineer chimps and other apes to be more intelligent. Any research proposal remotely related to the topic will be immediately shot down by someone simply stating, “do you want Planet of the Apes? Because this is how you get Planet of the Apes!”
That’s a good shower thought tbh.
I don’t agree with the premise, but it’s a good shower thought :)
The flaw in the premise is that all scientists are, first, human. This means that there is no perfection. This would make progress on smart apes slow because of the lower numbers willing to violate ethics to make it happen.
But ethics tend to decrease as pay increases, and if the potential profit of smarter apes is high enough, someone, somewhere would try it.
And there’s still scientists that don’t agree with the ethics that would prevent attempts at engineering apes. There’s people that would be hyped to do it just to learn something along the way (friendships?).