Just another science fiction? Not at
all.
As said in a BBC report, animal scientist
Dr. Pablo Ross and other researchers at University of California, Davis have
been injecting stem cells into pig embryos in order to create genetic mixtures
known as chimeras. Using gene editing, the team hopes to produce pigs that have
human pancreases…but still in a pig and as a pig.
Gene editing includes deleting the
portion of pig DNA responsible for the pancreas from a new pig embryo. Then,
then inject human stem cells into the embryo replacing the deleted DNA. And
finally, they implant the chimeric embryo into a sow and harvest the tissue
after 28 days.
If successful, this will be the answer
to the ongoing organ shortage crisis and would be lifesaving for those on those
on the waiting list.
But the experiment also raises a lot
of questions and could lead to controversies since if it is possible to inject
human DNA in a pig to grow pancreas, it is also possible to grow a human-like
brain in a pig’s body. And that’s not so pretty at all. Dr. Ross, however,
denies that possibility and says that “there is a very low potential but this
is something we will be investigating.”
Though the controversial line of
research addressed the organ shortage, it also poses philosophical questions
about the nature of humanity.
Will the pig with a human pancreas
still just be a pig? Dr. Jeffrey Kahn, the Levi Professor of Bioethics and
Public Policy at the John Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, has one of
those doubts. “What if it has a human pancreas, a human kidney, a human liver,
and a human heart?” The question’s going to arise eventually: When does it
become a human in a pig’s body?”
Kahn says, there’s no doubt that using
animals to grow personalized organs for dying humans is “an easier case to make
than using the animals for food.” But the ethical conversations around
human-animal chimera research are still ongoing, and still need time to
develop.
Human-animal chimera research is not
banned in the United States, but there is a wide gap between being illegal and
being openly endorsed.
There are more pressing problems to
address in this emerging field than the hypothetical pig with human brain. For once,
the research raises the question of how much animal sacrifice is justified in
the name of saving human lives.
Also, there is this more troubling
possibility that human-animal chimera research could result in the creation of
an animal virus that infects humans, known as a zoonosis.
The human-animal chimera research may
be miraculous and may be the only answer to save thousands of people from death
every year. But the nightmare scenarios will still raise fear and are still
possible.
Source: BBC The Daily Beast Independent
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