.....inventors of evil things... Romans 1:30
"Researchers in the U.S. and China announced earlier this month that
they made embryos that combined human and monkey cells for the first
time.
So far, these human-monkey chimeras (pronounced ky-meer-uhs)are
no more than bundles of budding cells in a lab dish, but the
implications are far-reaching, ethics experts say.
Scientists have been creating partly human chimeras for years.
Researchers use rats with human tumors to study cancer, for example, and
mice with human immune systems to conduct AIDS research.
---What makes the
latest experiment unique is that the scientists injected human stem
cells, which can become any kind of tissue, into an embryo of a primate.
To make them, researchers from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies
in La Jolla, Calif., and China’s Kunming University of Science and
Technology injected human stem cells—made by reprogramming mature skin
or blood cells—into 132 embryos from macaque monkeys. Six days after the
monkey embryos had been created at the State Key Laboratory of Primate
Biomedical Research in Kunming, researchers injected each one with 25
human stem cells labeled with a fluorescent red protein.... the new chimera experiment highlights a dilemma.
---When human stem
cells are injected into an animal embryo at such an early stage of
development, there so far is no way to control where they go or limit
what type of adult cells they become.
“It does show that the human stem cells tend to migrate far and
wide through the monkey embryo,” says Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist who is
involved in
international oversight of such research. “That is what leads to the
theoretical concern: There is a chance that in an uncontrolled way it
may lead to a mixing of human cells that may result in human cells
developing in the brain or the heart or from head to toe across the
body.” That means researchers can’t target the stem cells to create
specific organs or avoid random changes to the animal’s brain—at least
not yet.
In a glimpse of the potential effects, researchers at the
University of Rochester in 2014 transplanted human fetal brain cells
called astrocytes into young laboratory mice. They discovered that
within a year the human cells had taken over the mouse brains. Moreover,
standard tests for mouse memory and cognition showed that the altered
mice were smarter.
In his 2006 State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush
called the creation of human-animal hybrids one of “the most egregious
abuses of medical research.” Seven countries ban or restrict it. Since
2015, the U.S. National Institutes of Health has refused to fund
experiments that involve human stem cells added to early animal embryos.
Policy makers, however, might relax some restrictions this
year. An NIH spokeswoman says that the organization is awaiting the
release next month of updated guidelines from the International Society
for Stem Cell Research “to ensure our position reflects the input from
the community, which has been very thoughtful.” The agency lifted
restrictions on fetal-tissue research earlier this month.
“I believe that NIH is eager to move on,” says Dr. Hyun, who
led the committee that updated the society’s guidelines for experiments
involving human-primate chimeras." WSJ
