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| Fontaine, Dimitri. "Another Great Fosdem" 02/04/2013 via tapoueh. Public Domain Dedication License |
On January 11, 2016 Tracy Staedter, a journalist for
discover news, published an article about human-animal hybrids being grown for
organ transplants. The way they are doing this is by placing stem cells into
the embryos of sheep and pigs and letting them grow into the needed organ which
is then harvested.
This ignited a debate not only because the use of stem-cells
is very controversial but because people are worrying that the stem cells could
give the animals human characteristics and maybe even intelligence. Naturally stem-cells
want to specialize so people feel that mixing them with animal cells will cause
them to form human-animal hybrids.
The reason this work
is being done is because there is a long list of people waiting for organ
donations. People can be on the wait list for years as it is often hard for
them to find the perfect match or sometimes there are just not enough donors. Scientists
are hoping that this new method of organ-creation will help expedite the
process of waiting for an organ-transplant.
Ignoring the controversy, labs have already begun injecting
embryos with stem cells. Since there is not much known about growing human
organs in animals, these efforts are more about seeing what will happen not
actually producing a working organ. The National Institute of Health is taking
a wait and see approach with these studies and refusing to fund them until the
science behind it has been more closely examined.
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