Page 13 - IAV Digital Magazine #480

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Scientists Are Making Human- Monkey Hybrids In China
By Antonio Regalado
In a controversial first, a team of researchers have been creating embryos that are part human and part monkey, reports the Spanish daily El País.
Daring biolo-
gist: According to the newspaper, the Spanish-born biologist Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, who operates a lab at the Salk Institute in California, has been working working with monkey researchers in China to perform the disturbing research.
Their objective is to create “human- animal chimeras,” in this case mon- key embryos to which human cells are added. Why, why? The idea behind the research is to fashion animals that possess organs, like a kid- ney or liver, made up entirely of human cells. Such animals
could be used as sources of organs for transplanta- tion.
Making
chimeras: The technique for making chimeras involves injecting human embryonic stem cells into a days-old embryo of another species. The hope is that the human cells will grow along with the embryo, adding to it. Izpisúa Belmonte tried
making human-
animal
chimeras previ- ously by adding human cells to pig embryos, but the human
cells didn’t take hold effectively. Because mon- keys are geneti- cally closer to humans, it’s pos- sible that such experiments could now suc- ceed. To give the human cells a better chance of taking hold, sci- entists also use gene-editing tech- nology to disable
the formation of certain types of cells in the animal embryos. Controversial? Ex tremely. In the US, the National Institutes of Health says fed- eral funds can never be used to create mixed human-monkey embryos. However, there is no such rule in China, which is probably why the research is occur- ring there.
So far, no part- human part-mon-
key has been born. Instead, the mixed embryos are only being allowed to devel- op for a week or two in the lab, at which time they can be studied. That is according to Estrella Núñez, a biologist and administrator at the Catholic University of Murcia, in Spain, who told El País her university is helping to fund the research. Asked if the El Pais report is
accurate, the Salk Institute did not reply. Núñez said in an email she could not com- ment further until "the results are published." Questions: Pablo Ross, a veteri- nary researcher at the University of California, Davis, who previ- ously worked with Salk on the pig- human chimeras, says he doesn’t think it makes sense to try to grow human organs in mon- keys.
“I always made the case that it doesn’t make sense to use a primate for that. Typically they are very small, and they take too long to develop,” he says.
Ross suspects the researchers have more basic scientific ques- tions in mind. Injecting human cells into monkey embryos could address “ques- tions of evolution- ary distance and interspecies barri- ers,” he says.
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