“Has science gone too far?” it’s become something of a meme lately. People post the question sarcastically on pictures of homemade Oreos with cream from 100 cookies or a fast-food sandwich in which the buns are replaced with fried chicken. It’s funny, but scientists are now legitimately asking the question, after a team of researchers revealed that they created chimera embryos in the laboratory.
A chimera is a hybrid of two species. In this case, scientists working on new possibilities for the creation of laboratory-grown organs for human transplants have created early embryos that are half human and half monkey. The idea is that if scientists can raise parts of animals in the laboratory and those pieces are close enough to humans to be used for transplants, there could be an unlimited amount of new organs on the horizon. Problem? They grow human / monkey hybrids in a laboratory in order to cut them and glue the pieces to living people.
Scientists have in the past experimented with the use of certain types of human stem cells in animal embryos, including pigs and mice. They found that the tissues were simply too different to allow for strong integration. Monkeys, on the other hand, are much more closely related to humans, and when using human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) in cynomolgus monkey embryos in the laboratory, they found that human cells integrated more deeply.
The formation of interspecies chimeras with human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC) is a necessary alternative for the assessment of hPSC pluripotency in vivo and could be a promising strategy for various applications of regenerative medicine, including the generation of organs and tissues for transplantation.
So scientists have found a way to make human stem cells play nicely with monkey embryos, but that’s not all. They also found that the cells communicated in a way they did not necessarily expect. The findings suggest that there is much to learn about the evolutionary pathways of both humans and primates and may help the development of hybrids in the future, for better or for worse.
We also discovered the signaling events underlying the interspecific diaphragm that can help shape the unique developmental trajectories of human cells and monkeys in chimeric embryos. These results may help to better understand early human development and the evolution of primates and to develop strategies to improve human chimerism in evolutionarily distant species.
Finally, we will have to make a choice as a species. Are we good at creating what are essentially organ farms, in which we exploit nature (including other species) to grow organs for transplantation in humans? Could it finally save lives? Almost certainly yes. But those lives will be saved after we create a new hybrid species, at least in part, and then kill and harvest its organs. Creepy.
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Check out the original version of this article on BGR.com