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First Human-Pig "chimera" embryo created in lab

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It sounds like this is a human organ grown inside what is otherwise a pig?

That sounds weird and ethically strange, but it doesn't sound as bad as the title suggests. We raise and slaughter animals for food already. It's not like they're making a human with the body of a pig or something.

And if it works, I imagine it's still better than letting thousands of people die from lack of organ transplants every year.
they implanted cells that were converted back to stem cells into pig blastocysts (sperm meets egg).
 
Raising an animal to save someone's life is a much more worthy cause than raising an animal just to make a tasty dinner imo. I have no idea why people are upset with this.
 
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We already raise pigs for their meat. Whats the big deal about raising them for their genetic engineered organs?

Unless you people are reading "human-pig chimera" and thinking of something out of Beyond Good & Evil. Spoilers: It is not.
 
Raising an animal to save someone's life is a much more worthy cause than raising an animal just to make a tasty dinner imo. I have no idea why people are upset with this.
Because its part human. I think its pretty easy to understand why people are uncomfortable since this is a first time thing.
 
Raising an animal to save someone's life is a much more worthy cause than raising an animal just to make a tasty dinner imo. I have no idea why people are upset with this.

We already raise pigs for their meat. Whats the big deal about raising them for their genetic engineered organs?

Unless you people are reading "human-pig chimera" and thinking of something out of Beyond Good & Evil. Spoilers: It is not.

Outside of the pig jokes, most people just seem to be scientifically illiterate or unaware of what the transplant scene looks like because it doesn't concern them (yet). For what it's worth, research animals are treated far more humanely than those in agriculture.
 
Because its part human. I think its pretty easy to understand why people are uncomfortable since this is a first time thing.

If people would actually read the OP, they would realize that "part human" in this case just means a normal animal with a human organ growing in it. It's not like anyone went and fucked a pig
except David Cameron
 
Seriously though, this is going to have some really interesting ethical debates around harvesting human organs if we manage to achieve that some day. A lot of people want to move in the direction of lab-grown meat.
 
Because its part human. I think its pretty easy to understand why people are uncomfortable since this is a first time thing.

Insignificant part though, wish people (in general, not anyone here) would take a little time to educate themselves on the subject before getting their panties in a bunch.
 
Other scientists had already figured out how to grow the pancreatic tissue of a rat inside a mouse. On Wednesday, that team announced that mouse pancreases grown inside rats successfully treated diabetes when parts of the healthy organs were transplanted into diseased mice.

The Salk-led group took the concept one step further, using the genome editing tool called CRISPR to hack into mouse blastocysts—the precursors of embryos. There, they deleted genes that mice need to grow certain organs. When they introduced rat stem cells capable of producing those organs, those cells flourished.

...

In all, the team created 186 later-stage chimeric embryos that survived, says Wu, and “we estimate [each had] about one in 100,000 human cells.”

...

The human tissue appears to slow the growth of the embryo, notes Cheng, and organs grown from such embryos as they develop now would likely be rejected by humans, since they would contain so much pig tissue.

The next big step, says Cheng, is to figure out whether it's possible to increase the number of human cells the embryos can tolerate. The current method is a start, but it still isn't clear if that hurdle can be overcome.

Belmonte agrees, noting that it could take years to use the process to create functioning human organs.

So this is almost a chimera in name only. They have a long way to go. They're not going to be making pigs that walk around and talk. When they get further with this, they'll just be deleting the pigs' genes needed to grow certain organs and replacing them with human stem cells for those organs.

It's creepy in concept, but much less so in the project's current state, IMO.
 
Believe me, I'm not too happy about factory farming, but its a necessary evil for our society size and economy now. So this kind of adds to the ethic problem.

Hopefully we will move on to synthetic meat not too far into the future, for mass production.
 
I don't actually mind the Chimera part, but harvesting the organs later from them is a little dark for me.

I'll wait until we can just grow and maintain them in labs
 
I have no problem with this.

It isn't a hybrid in the half human, half pig sense. It's more like using a pig as an incubator for a human kidney.

That said, I thought we were on our way to growing organs in petri dishes. Maybe that will be viable before this.
 
But for lead study author Jun Wu of the Salk Institute, we need only look to mythical chimeras—like the human-bird hybrids we know as angels—for a different perspective.

"In ancient civilizations, chimeras were associated with God," he says, and our ancestors thought "the chimeric form can guard humans." In a sense, that's what the team hopes human-animal hybrids will one day do.

Um

Other scientists had already figured out how to grow the pancreatic tissue of a rat inside a mouse. On Wednesday, that team announced that mouse pancreases grown inside rats successfully treated diabetes when parts of the healthy organs were transplanted into diseased mice.

The Salk-led group took the concept one step further, using the genome editing tool called CRISPR to hack into mouse blastocysts—the precursors of embryos. There, they deleted genes that mice need to grow certain organs. When they introduced rat stem cells capable of producing those organs, those cells flourished.

The mice that resulted managed to live into adulthood. Some even grew gall bladders, which haven't been part of the species for 18 million years.

Man this shit is fascinating and crazy.

I have no problem with this.

It isn't a hybrid in the half human, half pig sense. It's more like using a pig as an incubator for a human kidney.

That said, I thought we were on our way to growing organs in petri dishes. Maybe that will be viable before this.

That's mentioned in the article.

Cells must survive in Petri dishes. Scientists have to use scaffolds to make sure the organs grow into the right shapes. And often, patients must undergo painful and invasive procedures to harvest the tissues needed to kick off the process.
 
Seriously though, this going to have some really interesting ethical debates around harvesting human organs if we manage to achieve that some day. A lot of people want to move in the direction of lab-grown meat.

This might just be an intermediary between donor and fully vat-grown organs, sure.

The general goal would be to be able to grow (or even print) an organ on-demand, but in the meantime this makes for a pretty compelling stop-gap solution.
 
This does raise some interesting ethical questions. If I grow a human part on a pig then eat the human part is that cannibalism? And if I grow a human dick on a pig and suck it is that bestiality? I would say no and yes.
 
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