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China Science

Scientists Are Making Human-Monkey Hybrids in China (technologyreview.com) 210

Posted by msmash from the stranger-things dept.
glowend shares a report: In a controversial first, a team of researchers have been creating embryos that are part human and part monkey, reports the Spanish daily El Pais. According to the newspaper, the Spanish-born biologist Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, who operates a lab at the Salk Institute in California, has been working with monkey researchers in China to perform the disturbing research. Their objective is to create "human-animal chimeras," in this case monkey embryos to which human cells are added. The idea behind the research is to fashion animals that possess organs, like a kidney or liver, made up entirely of human cells. Such animals could be used as sources of organs for transplantation. 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. Izpisua Belmonte tried making human-animal chimeras previously by adding human cells to pig embryos, but the human cells didn't take hold effectively. Because monkeys are genetically closer to humans, it's possible that the new experiments could now succeed. To give the human cells a better chance of taking hold, scientists also use gene-editing technology to disable the formation of certain types of cells in the animal embryos.
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Scientists Are Making Human-Monkey Hybrids in China More

Scientists Are Making Human-Monkey Hybrids in China

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  • Geez... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Dru Nemeton ( 4964417 )
    ...what could possibly go wrong?

    • Re: Geez... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01, 2019 @05:31PM (#59025196)

      They could become slashdot editors?

    • Wrong is one of two ways it could go (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @06:49PM (#59025756) Journal

      Think about it. We cloned Dolly the Sheep in 1996, and it was widely reported that a Chinese scientist cloned monkeys a year and a half ago.

      That's just what we know has happened. Genetic splicing and dicing could be the end of us; or, perhaps the adaptations necessary for life off planet will be created from it.

      I know one thing. Don't bet against the life form so encumbered with its own mortality that it has a doomsday clock. Wait until we're splicing human DNA with the tardigrades.

    • A lot of things could go wrong. None of them sufficiently interesting to make a movie about.

      The vast majority are of the form: And then the monkey died.

      But possibly you were thinking something more Michael Bay'ish.

      • A lot of things could go wrong. None of them sufficiently interesting to make a movie about.

        The vast majority are of the form: And then the monkey died.

        But possibly you were thinking something more Michael Bay'ish.

        And then the monkey EXPLODED!

    • In terms of horrible disasters? Not much. These aren't hybrids in the sense that they've got half human & half monkey DNA, they're chimeras in the sense that they have different types of tissue. They're just monkey embryos, with some human stem cells added in to see if human organs for transplants can be grown in the monkeys. Whether or not it works is another matter, but conceptually I fail to see how this is ethically problematic in any meaningful way. It's basically just using animals as surroga

      • You might be interested in how this process produced "unexpected" cellular fusion events when performed with porcine/human chimeras some years back. This resulted in transfer and humanization of Porcine endemic retrovirus, which is normally not possible.

        https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]

        The same is likely to occur here as well.

        The risk of creating new zoonotic pathogens is very high, as is the risk of introducing unwanted genetic material.

        • The former sure, as for the latter... I hope nobody is getting chimeric gonads transplanted in...

          • I know this is kinda late as a reply but still--

            Cloned gonads are kinda a needed thing for people who have had sex change operations, since once organ manufacture is a thing, "correct" replacements become possible.

            There is also the whole "Uterine transplant" phenomenon for women who have had emergency hysterectomies from sustaining injuries, or who have congenital defects that require such measures for their fertility.

            It's not really so far fetched to look a little further into the future, and see that as a

  • Do you want Planet of the Apes? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01, 2019 @05:31PM (#59025188)

    This is how you get Planet of the Apes.

  • Not really (Score:5, Informative)

    by Peptidoglycan ( 5157521 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @05:32PM (#59025204)
    FTA:

    So far, no part-human part-monkey has been born. Instead, the mixed embryos are only being allowed to develop 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.

    and

    Pablo Ross, a veterinary researcher at the University of California, Davis, who previously worked with Salk on the pig-human chimeras, says he doesn’t think it makes sense to try to grow human organs in monkeys. “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 questions in mind. Injecting human cells into monkey embryos could address “questions of evolutionary distance and interspecies barriers,” he says.

  • Is China running out of political prisoners? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @05:33PM (#59025212)

    I thought they had all the organs they need from all those folks who've been tossed into prison for disagreeing with the government. Maybe they figure it will be cheaper to grow-to-order so they can just kill the prisoners and save the cost of incarceration.

    • Also displaying their corpses to educate children (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Shane_Optima ( 4414539 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @05:49PM (#59025334) Journal
      They don't just do that. They plasticize the naked bodies of their murdered political prisoners and sell them to American science centers so that schoolchildren can point and laugh at their penises [wikipedia.org]. I'm not just being funny or flippant here; this is something I actually witnessed firsthand after my girlfriend dragged me to one of these traveling exhibitions at our local science center.

      At the time, I idly thought it was odd that all of their eyes looked east asian; I thought maybe it was some artifact of the preservation process. Then I went online and looked it up.

      The funny part is the truly relentless capitalism of it all. Sorry, I meant "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" [wikipedia.org].
      • Wow, I'd read about the organ harvesting but I didn't realize that the plasticized body thing was also going on. Culturally, dehumanizing the 'other' is always a problem, but the more I read about this sort of thing I wonder if they have a culture that just never humanizes anyone in the first place...

    • The organs tyou refer to might not be compatible with human-monkey hybrids. What do you do, for example, if you're Jack Ma and you need a new liver?

    • Well, that is an american myth.
      Organs are only harvested from people who face the death penalty, and that are:
      a) government corruption at high scale
      b) gang crime
      c) murder
      d) rape - depending on the case

      Disagreeing is not a crime, protesting might be, and the penalty is "schooling detention", not "organ harvest".

      • Well, that is an american myth. Organs are only harvested from people who face the death penalty, and that are: a) government corruption at high scale b) gang crime c) murder d) rape - depending on the case

        Disagreeing is not a crime, protesting might be, and the penalty is "schooling detention", not "organ harvest".

        Do the Uyghurs and Falun Gong members whose organs have been harvested [wikipedia.org] fall under any of your categories a), b), c), or d)? I rather suspect that most of them do not. Besides, in China the only qualification for a citizen to face the death penalty, is for that citizen's death to be useful or convenient for the government.

        • Unlike popular believe, China has independent courts of law.
          Your link is about _illegal_ death penalties and potential harvesting, not about a standard practice.

      • Well aren't you the good little river crab?

  • "My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack's muscles and nerves are ideal for his task. And the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?" -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter"

  • You could have slaves without human rights, but capable of doing human work. You want chimps writing code? They can deliver. And when they burn out, sell them to the next slave driver to work in the fields. Let them know that slackers are walking organ donors.
  • I for one welcome our eight-buttocked overlords!
  • I think this is how the planet of the apes started.

  • Bring on the future (Score:5, Informative)

    by Shane_Optima ( 4414539 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @05:41PM (#59025270) Journal
    Bring it on, Planet of the Apes jokes and all. Only after people (including the self-annointed "bioethicists") realize that this is coming (whether we want it to or not) will we finally be able to develop a realistic and hopefully at least somewhat ethical way of dealing with it.

    Ethics and morality are the calculus of human happiness vs. suffering or, more generally, the suffering vs. happiness of conscious creatures. In this case, one lesson to be learned (or rather, highlighted) might be that hundreds of thousands of people die every year because our laws and culture are not properly incentivizing organ transplantation. Is anyone going to read this story and try to address that? Are they going to brainstorm about various ways to culture cloned human organs without risking the suffering of other conscious creatures, or at least minimizing that suffering?

    Or, you know, are people just going to retreat into their neo-Luddite caves and spew Planet of the Apes / GATTACA / Jurassic Park quotes all day long and pretend that the real problem is that this feels icky and strange and new, and that the proper response to the fear of the unknown is to simply avoid progress?

    We were predicting this would probably unfold in China or Russia even before CRISPR came along, for this very reason. And this is what scientists are doing *openly*. Imagine what they are planning to do, or are already doing, clandestinely. There are millions of rich parents in the world who are not opposed to the concept of having kids that are smarter or otherwise gifted. What's your plan of action for dealing with these people? Just keep wagging your finger and feeling "disturbed"?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by nonBORG ( 5254161 )
      There are various schools of ethics, but the main categories are Utilitarian, Hedonistic and Deontology. You seem to have fallen into the Hedonistic set which is really a branch of Utilitarian Ethics. Good luck with that.

      In case you did not know, Hedonistic is basically maximal happiness. So the ethical decision is driven by the result (where the result is one that maximises happiness.)

      Of course one of the main problems is it does require seeing the future as some decisions intended to bring happiness d

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by geekoid ( 135745 )

        And all of them are wrong. Or more accurately so mypoic as to be useless in any practical way.

      • I think I fall into a "pragmatic" school, if there is one, insofar as endlessly finger-wagging at people to behave in ways fundamentally contrary to human nature is not a productive use of your time. In the long run, people will tend to work around, overcome and overturn rules that appear, at their core, to do nothing blindly to hinder the happiness or enhance the suffering of conscious creatures.

        Deontology however simply says there is right and wrong the ethical decision is to do what is right regardless of the consequences.

        With arbitrary whims used to set those rules. I don't say that we can directly quantify happiness or suffering.

        • One quick note: it may sound like I'm aping Sam Harris here but really I'd worked this all out on my own by the time I was 15 (although I did sort of overlook the concept of God's happiness; that additional observation was a useful one.) Not bragging, just saying that this is a very intuitive thing for anyone who's thought about it for 15 minutes. There's basically no moral precept to be found in *any* human civilization that doesn't directly involve the happiness or suffering of conscious creatures.

          • There is no God. Therefore what is or isn't ethical is entirely up to us to decide. We don't have the luxury of ducking responsibility for our decisions "because God".

            Throwing God into the mix is a cowardly way of avoiding ultimate responsibility for deciding what is and isn't right. And that would still be true is god did exist.

            • No real disagreement but the point is you don't have to let religion sidetrack the larger debate about what morality/ethics *are*. Some people, like the guy I just replied to, try to say that if you try to "reduce" morality down to the question of talking about the happiness/suffering of conscious creatures, that means you're a utilitarian or a hedonist or a whateverthefuck and they attack you on those grounds.

              My point is that's total bullshit. No one has yet invented an ethical system of any significa

            • There is no God, we therefore create meaning, and then have a responsibility to that meaning that we made up, in an already known to be meaningless world? Your meaning is as meaningless as your statement.
              Smart enough to deny meaning comes from God but dumb enough to stand by the one you made up, in his absence.

    • In my mind, we are right on the cusp of GATTACA. The commoditization of the requisite technology is happening right now in the labs of a multinational company near you. The cultural ideology of forcing children to excel at all costs grows stronger every day.

      In fact, the movie showed a rather mild version of what is possible, with doctors fertilizing 50-100 eggs in Petri dishes and a genetic counselor helping the parents review the portfolios of the most promising 5 or 6 to decide which to implant. It is

      • The cultural ideology of forcing children to excel at all costs grows stronger every day.

        Giving someone genetic advantages and "forcing them to excel" are two very different things. It may turn out to be true that "tiger parents" will be more drawn to "genetic enhancement" than the rest, but that doesn't mean that the technology is inherently cruel to the offspring.

        Will there be medical side effects and nasty social issues and mountains of lurid headlines along the way? Of course. I mean, *of course* the technologies will be rife with unforeseen issues and social tensions. The point is... we

        • Most genes have side effects.
          Nope ... that is a 7. myth.

    • I agree. I hate this kneejerk response so many people seem to have toward biotechnology. We breed animals, ride animals, slaughter them by the millions, harvest eggs, force lactation, keep them in little cages & bowls, create dog breeds that live in pain like pugs and bulldogs, use glue traps that starve pest animals, crush countless animals on the road everyday, use them to test drugs...but suddenly this is going too far? Please. There's nothing special about this sort of research, there's nothing

    • are people just going to retreat into their neo-Luddite caves and spew Planet of the Apes / GATTACA / Jurassic Park quotes all day long and pretend that the real problem is that this feels icky and strange and new, and that the proper response to the fear of the unknown is to simply avoid progress?

      Even if they do, if they only concentrate on genetics when they try to avoid progress, they can still lose. There are plenty of other horsemen of the Partial People Apocalypse:

      * Genetic engineering to get actual

  • holy shit, just use humans for organs... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I mean if you are ethically OK with gen-mo human/monkey hybrids then why not just eliminate all the incompatibilities and other technical issues with making a chimera and just grow humans. I mean the Matrix already showed us the basic architecture for creating human farms. It will solve our global energy issue and our apparent organ issue.

    WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK!

  • Use pigs for what they are originally created for- to grow replacement organs for humans.

  • Planet of the Apes (Score:3)

    by Kryptonut ( 1006779 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @06:02PM (#59025434)
    Haven't they seen the movie?!
  • Seriously, the whole article looks like some 1800's newspaper reporting on evolution.

    This is golden-era-yellow-journalism level web garbage.

    The kind that both takes effort to hit those hot buttons of ignorance, but shows zero regard for the subject.

    Here's the text:

    Scientists are making human-monkey hybrids in China

    In a controversial first, a team of researchers have been creating embryos that are part human and part monkey, reports the Spanish daily El PaÃs.

    Daring biologist: According t

  • This Q&A with Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte [scientificamerican.com]

    In it he describes success in growing mice with rat parts, and vice versa, and uses a car analogy to explain how gestation times determine the suitability of a host species. He also makes an interesting point:

    "If you look on the Internet you see images of chimeras between human and animal. And I feel that that’s a little bit of exaggeration."

  • Bio-Engineering (Score:5, Informative)

    by SMACX guy ( 1003684 ) on Thursday August 01, 2019 @06:07PM (#59025464) Homepage
    "Why do you insist that the human genetic code is 'sacred' or 'taboo?' It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter we are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself." -- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang ,"Looking God in the Eye"

    • Some civilian workers got in among the research patients today and became so hysterical I felt compelled to have them nerve stapled. The consequence, of course, will be another public relations nightmare, but I was severely shaken by the extent of their revulsion towards a project so vital to our survival.

      CEO Nwabudike Morgan,

      The Personal Diaries

    • Right now there is a clear gap between human and non-human, with many countries / societies recognizing a basic set of rights for everything in the "human" category. I don't want that gap to close to the point where it is not clear what rights hybrids should have.

      Think of the very valid (on both sides) controversy about abortion - the question of the status of something that can grow into a human. I think arguments over chimaras would be far worse.

  • We've had monkey men in the U.S. for years. Mostly they run for political office here.

  • ... for several years now on the news channels. Haven't some of them even been elected into power, already?

  • ... and it's a word that I don't use very often:

    Evil.

    • If this can help people, I think letting someone who needs organ transplants just die because society got icked out by research involving xenotransplantation from gene altered animals would way worse than growing human organs in an animal, but that's just me. Was it also evil when pigs were used as a source of insulin?
    • Questions you should be asking before making such pronouncements:

      What if the organ is superfluous to the animal and can be surgically removed without killing it? What if the animal's nervous system remains unaffected, so mentally it is still non-human?

      Then again, I suppose this *is* still the Trump era, where gut feelings are supposed to trump everything else, so you're right. Fuck rational inquiry.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • It doesn't sound like this would result in animal DNA propagating to the human's gonads. Also, we do indeed have backups: tons of people have had their genome sequenced.

          Which is not to say that biotech does have some very serious hidden dangers. Anything involving microbes in particular (especially microbes with generalist lifestyles / cosmopolitan distributions) should at minimum be given tons of scrutiny. But I don't think any such dangers exist here. The dangers here are ethical, if animals are give
  • Don't monkey, with the monkey
    Don't monkey, with the monkey
    Don't monkey, with the monkey
    Those Chinese scientists made a monkey out of me!

  • Humans later on. The path has been laid out!

  • I was up all last night, worried myself sick that they wouldn't make human/ape hybrids. : P
  • They should genetically engineer a monkey with 4 asses. Now how could would that be ?

  • Orange monkeys^h^h^h^h^h^hApes?

  • Leaving the ethical part aside, wouldnt it make more sense to use species with a faster life cycle and higher fertilite rate like rabbits or mice?
  • "Chimeras" are not "Hybrids".

  • Oh my God, I was wrong. It was Earth, all along. You finally made a monkey-

    Yes, we finally made a monkey-

    You finally made a monkey out of meeeeeeeeeeeeee! I LOVE you Dr Zaius!

    -Troy McClure, Planet of the Apes: The Musical

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