Douglas Munoz, a neuroscientist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada thought the project was a dangerous road to go down. He said: ‘For us to start to manipulate life functions in this kind of way without fully knowing how to turn it off, or stop it if something goes awry really scares me.’ In July China proposed creating monkeys with partially human-derived brains with the aim of studying diseases like alzheimer’s. Yale University stem cell expert Alejandro De Los Angeles said adapting animals to help stimulate human diseases has been the ‘holy grail’ of biomedical research for decades.
The piglet embryos had monkey stem cells injected into them, which were adjusted to produce fluorescent protein. This allowed researchers to find where the cells ended up.
"This is the first report of full-term monkey-pig chimeras," Tang Hai, from the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology in Beijing told New Scientist.
The scientists think there was a problem with the IVF process as the two chimera piglets died within a week. Even normal piglets that were implanted with monkey DNA died.
While the experiment has garnered a lot of attention, some scientists and science groups have called it unethical and warned the lab against creating chimeras.
“For us to start to manipulate life functions in this kind of way without fully knowing how to turn it off, or stop it if something goes awry really scares me,” said neuroscientist Douglas Munoz from Queen's University in Kingston.
Despite several notices and warnings from the scientific community, experiments in China are continuing unabated. In July, Chinese scientists proposed to create monkeys with partially human-derived brains in order to study diseases like Alzheimer's.
But he said a ‘coordinated approach’ is needed to make sure such a project is done ethically. A human-pig hybrid embryo was created in January 2017 by scientists in San Fransisco but died 28 days later. It is hoped the research could offer an alternative to organ donation. Around three people a day die in the UK according to the NHS and 12 in the US because replacement organs cannot be found.
Two chimera piglets carrying monkey DNA have been born in China following an experiment that has created a rift among scientists. Researchers hoped the move would enable the growing of human organs inside animals for transplantation. But others have warned against playing God and say the ethical implications of such an experiment ‘scares them’. It took more than 4,000 embryos to create the piglets, which had genetic material from cynomolgus monkeys in their hearts, livers, spleens, lungs and skin. They died within the week but both of them appeared normal when they were first born.
