Making a commotion, US scientists create a human-monkey mixture creature

CALIFORNIA – Scientists from the Salk Institute in California, United States of America (USA), has produced a mixture of human-monkey creatures with human mother selves. The work was criticized by experts who questioned ethics.

A group of American scientists has produced human-monkey chimeras after growing human cells in monkey embryos. The work is in an effort to better understand how cells develop and communicate with each other.

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The term chimera is actually a fictional creature from Greek mythology which is described as a mixture of various living things. Today, the term is often used to describe a creature made from a combination of two different genetics.

Some ethicists in the UK have raised concerns, saying the work poses significant ethical and legal challenges and opens Pandora’s box for “human-nonhuman” chimeras.

They are calling for a public discussion of the ethical and regulatory challenges associated with human-animal chimeras.

In their work, researchers from the Salk Institute in California inserted human cells — specialized cells that have the ability to develop into different types of cells — into monkey embryos in petri dishes in the laboratory.

The scientists, led by Professor Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, say their work could pave the way to address the shortage of transplanted organs and help understand more about human early development, disease progression and aging.

“Approach chimeric this could be very useful for advancing biomedical research not only at the earliest stages of life, but also at the newest stages of life, “said Belmonte. The Mirror, Friday (16/4/2021).

In 2017, Belmonte and his team created the first human-pig hybrid, in which they inserted human cells into early-stage pig tissue but found that human cells in this environment had poor molecular communication.

So the team decided to investigate chimeras growing in the laboratory using a more closely related species, namely monkeys.

Embryo chimeric the human-monkey was monitored in the laboratory for 19 days before being destroyed.

According to scientists, the results are published in the journal Cell, showing that human stem cells “survived and integrated with better relative efficiency than previous experiments on pig tissue”.

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