How nice. Let's create a being we can use to harvest their organs for our own use. (This is not a new idea, even if you don't buy into the gods from a different planet theory.) Now just imagine the researchers are very successful, and they get better at it, they keep adding human genes, the creatures get more and more like humans and less like monkeys, and the earth is dying so they have to send some to another planet for future populations. Sometimes, I think we're on an infinity loop.Efforts to create human-animal chimeras have rebooted an ethical debate after reports emerged that scientists have produced monkey embryos containing human cells.
A chimera is an organism whose cells come from two or more “individuals”, with recent work looking at combinations from different species. The word comes from a beast from Greek mythology which was said to be part lion, part goat and part snake.
The latest report, published in the Spanish newspaper El País, claims a team of researchers led by Prof Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte from the Salk Institute in the US have produced monkey-human chimeras. The research was conducted in China “to avoid legal issues”, according to the report.
Chimeras are seen as a potential way to address the lack of organs for transplantation, as well as problems of organ rejection. Scientists believe organs genetically matched to a particular human recipient could one day be grown inside animals.
[...]
Izpisúa Belmonte and other scientists have previously managed to produce both pig embryos and sheep embryos which contain human cells, although the proportions are tiny: in the latter case, researchers estimate that only one cell in 10,000 was human. Pig-human and sheep-human chimeras are attractive in part because pigs and sheep have organs about the right size for transplantation into humans.
The Guardian
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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