Experimentation continues on chimera embryos
by Xavier Symons | 22 May 2016 | 1 comment
A group of scientists in the US are continuing to conduct research on human-animal hybrid embryos, despite a moratorium on funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Pablo Ross, a reproductive biologist from the University of California, Davis, has been working with a research team to implant human induced pluripotent cells in pig embryos, with the hope of growing human organs in developing porcine fetuses.
Ross has availed himself of alternative funding sources in the wake of the NIH’s decision last September to withhold funding until further study was done into the ethics of chimera experimentation.
"We're not trying to make a chimera just because we want to see some kind of monstrous creature," Ross told NPR. "We're doing this for a biomedical purpose."
After injecting human cells into the pig embryos, Ross and his team implant the embryo in a pig uterus, and allow it to grow for 28 days until they remove it again for dissection.
Importantly, Ross’s team is not the only one to have continued research following the moratorium. At the beginning of this year, it was revealed that scientists at the Salk Institute in California and the University of Minnesota had created hybrid embryos with the aim of growing human organs inside farm animals such as sheep and pigs.
Some bioethicists are gravely concerned about the creation of chimera embryos. "You're getting into unsettling ground that I think is damaging to our sense of humanity," Stuart Newman, a professor of cell biology and anatomy at the New York Medical College, told NPR.
"If you have pigs with partly human brains you would have animals that might actually have consciousness like a human," Newman says. "It might have human-type needs. We don't really know."
Research into chimera embryos is still technically legal in the US. It is also legal in the UK, with the Home Office releasing new guidelines last February that would allow for research into the “huge potential” of chimera embryos, while still providing a “robust ethical and regulatory framework”.
Twelve years ago, political scientist Francis Fukuyama described transhumanism as “the world’s most dangerous idea”. In 2004, that sounded a bit daft -- almost no one had ever heard of the idea. For many people it still does, but now transhumanism is going mainstream.
Movies are being made about transhumanist themes; newspapers like the Washington Post are running feature articles on it; and a transhumanist is running for US President. It is indeed dangerous. As Fukuyama said:
The seeming reasonableness of the project, particularly when considered in small increments, is part of its danger. Society is unlikely to fall suddenly under the spell of the transhumanist worldview. But it is very possible that we will nibble at biotechnology's tempting offerings without realizing that they come at a frightful moral cost.
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