These are the types of things that really piss me off about the scientific community. Look, I get it, you have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, but spending time, resources, and valuable minds on trying to create some sort of man-pig monster isn’t going to help anybody anytime soon. Let’s get the important shit (global warming, fossil fuels, deadly diseases, etc.) under control before we start mixing and matching animal genes.
Via Washington Post:
For the first time, scientists have grown an embryo that is part-pig, part-human.
The experiment, described Thursday in the journal Cell, involves injecting human stem cells into the embryo of a pig, then implanting the embryo in the uterus of a sow and allowing it to grow. After four weeks, the stem cells had developed into the precursors of various tissue types, including heart, liver and neurons, and a small fraction of the developing pig was made up of human cells.
The human-pig hybrid — dubbed a “chimera” for the mythical creature with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail — was “highly inefficient,” the researchers cautioned. But it’s the most successful human-animal chimera and a significant step toward the development of animal embryos with functioning human organs.
The creation was the first demonstration that such an interspecies organ transplant is possible. The hope is that one day doctors may be able to grow human tissue using chimera embryos in farm animals, making organs available for sick human patients who might otherwise wait years for a transplant.
That’s all fine and good, but seriously, how far away are we from this kind of medicine being practical? The benefits are there, all I’m saying is let’s start tangibly fighting disease instead of trying to create human organs out of farm animals.
