Chinese scientists have managed to manufacture two chimera piglets that were produced in part with monkey DNA after 4,000 attempts.
“This is the first report of full-term monkey-pig chimeras,” Tang Hai told the New Scientist on Friday. Hai, who worked with a team to make the animals, made the announcement at the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology in Beijing.
The team has a way to go since the two small pigs died a week after birth. The team’s goal is to grow human organs in monkeys so they can be transplanted to humans.
The project creates a myriad of ethical concerns and has been condemned by other scientists. “For us to start to manipulate life functions in this kind of way without fully knowing how to turn it off, or stop it if something goes awry really scares me,” neuroscientist Douglas Munoz, who works at Queen’s University in Canada, said.
In the United States, a human-pig embryo was created in 2017 at Salk Institute in San Diego, but it died after 28 days.
