Abstract  Remakes of popular novels and films indicate how animals have become a primary means of representing not only the rapid development and proliferation of genetically modified organisms in plant form but also the interplay of aesthetics and scientific technologies in the post-Darwinian emphasis on species as a social form. Where vivisection worked in the 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau as a scientific mechanism for social dominance, ensuing versions of the story over the past 100 years have come to position eugenic breeding and, most recently, transgenic splicing as the trope for playing out the central cultural work of ordering species in the distinction of human species being. But the contradictions of representing animals also open up other possibilities for genetic aesthetics. Especially in the 1996 film remake, the isolation of the successful transgenic animal (akin to what artist Eduardo Kac calls “the beautiful chimera”) and her alignment with the human become the conditions of possibility for a theriocentric (nonhuman animal centered) community of animal transgenics that emerges in opposition to the human genetic aesthetic. Animals remain the medium in which these struggles are (re)enacted, but their transgenic forms enable an investigation of how and why the human is increasingly defined as genetically 0.1% removed from the animal.