Mixed animal and human
What do you think about it?
- The experiment has my blessing30%
- The end justifies the means41%
- This clearly goes too far30%
The competition has ended.
Are animal-human hybrids the future of organ donation?
31.7.2019
Translation: machine translated
I keep hearing bizarre things from Japan. Weird sexual preferences, wacky restaurants and now: permission to give birth to a hybrid of animal and human cells.
What sounds like a wacky science fiction film has just been officially approved in the Land of the Rising Sun: The birth of a chimera, i.e. an organism made up of genetically different cells. As strange as this may sound, the reason behind it makes sense. Scientists want to use the experiment to grow organs that can be transplanted into people who are waiting for a donor organ. This is reported by the scientific magazine nature. . Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who conducts research at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, plans to grow human cells in mouse and rat embryos and then implant them in a "surrogate animal". Until now, this second step was not permitted. Despite official permission, Nakauchi is planning to proceed slowly and not have any hybrid embryos completely transferred for the time being. This is to ensure a constant dialogue with the public, which often reacts defensively and fearfully to such topics.
But it is not only the public that has reservations. Bioethicists are also concerned that the human cells could not only be used to build the missing organ, but could also migrate further. For example, into the brain, where they could impair cognitive processes. According to Nakauchi, however, attention is being paid to this. The scientists create an animal embryo that lacks the gene for the development of a certain organ, in Nakauchi's case the pancreas. Human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) are then injected into the embryo. iPS are, for example, skin cells that have been reverted to an early stage of development. This allows them to develop back into any type of tissue and into various organs. As the animal develops, these cells are used to produce the missing organ.
In 2017, such an experiment already worked between mice and rats. The iPS cells from a mouse were injected into a rat embryo without a pancreas. This formed a pancreas entirely from mouse cells, which was then transplanted into a mouse with diabetes. The result? A mouse cured of diabetes. It won't be quite as simple with humans. As soon as animals and humans are genetically too far apart, the endeavour has not yet really worked. For example, a sheep embryo injected with iPS cells contained hardly any human cells after a 28-day growth phase. Something like a pancreas was not even in sight.
In addition to these scientific problems, many ethical hurdles will also have to be overcome. Because until now, for many of us, such hybrid forms were at most protagonists in our nightmares. If you ask me: if this actually means that seriously ill people can get a donor organ more quickly, then that's fine by me.
My life in a nutshell? On a quest to broaden my horizon. I love discovering and learning new skills and I see a chance to experience something new in everything – be it travelling, reading, cooking, movies or DIY.
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