Scientists are pushing scientific and ethical boundaries with their latest biological experiments. A pig-monkey hybrid chimera has been created in a Chinese laboratory. Have scientists not learned that creating mutants by combining multiple species always ends in tragedy according to every science-fiction movie ever?
New Scientist reported Chinese scientists successfully took pig monkey cells and injected them into pig embryos to create a pig-primate hybrid animal in a Frankenstein-esque experimentation.
Researchers at the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology in Beijing “genetically modified cynomolgus monkey cells growing in culture so they produced a fluorescent protein called GFP, according to New Scientist.
“This enabled the researchers to track the cells and their descendants,” the exclusive scientific report stated. “They then derived embryonic stem cells from the modified cells and injected them into pig embryos five days after fertilization.”
RELATED: World’s First Monkey-Human Hybrid Created By Scientists Who Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should
Scientists used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to implant more than 4,000 embryos in female pigs. Of the 4,000 embryos, only 10 resulted in pregnancies that were carried to full term. And of those 10, just two were chimeras, which are a “single organism composed of cells with distinct genotypes. In animals, this means an individual derived from two or more zygotes, which can include possessing blood cells of different blood types, subtle variations in form (phenotype).”
The two pig-primate chimeras both died within a week of being born. The two piglet chimeras looked normal despite being part monkey. The cause of death was not revealed, but the research team hypothesizes that it had to do with the IVF process and not the integration of the two species.
The pig-monkey hybrid animals had heart, liver, spleen, lung, and skin tissue that had primate cells, but the proportion was extremely low, between one in 1,000 and one in 10,000.
“This is the first report of full-term pig-monkey chimeras,” said Tang Hai at the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology.
“Given the extremely low chimeric efficiency and the deaths of all the animals, I actually see this as fairly discouraging,” stem cell biologist Paul Knoepfler from the University of California, Davis, told New Scientist.
So for the immediate future, humans thankfully won’t be able to genetically modify creatures like in H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau. But you also won’t be able to get a brand new lab-grown pig organ to replace your liver from your toxic alcoholism any time soon.
The findings from the chimera experiment were published in the journal Protein and Cell. The paper titled “Domesticated cynomolgus monkey embryonic stem cells allow the generation of neonatal interspecies chimeric pigs” stated humans were “one step closer to producing tissue-specific functional cells and organs in a large animal model.”
The first time a hybrid animal was created was in 2010, where pancreas cells from rats were merged with mice at Stanford University in California. The world’s first human-pig chimera was created in 2017 at the Salk Institute in California. Mad scientists created monkey-human hybrids in China a few months ago.
Time for a cautionary warning from the distinguished Dr. Ian Malcolm: “Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
[Futurism]
