First Human-Pig 'Chimera' Created in Milestone Study (theguardian.com) 158
Scientists have created a human-pig hybrid in a milestone study that raises the prospect of being able to grow human organs inside animals for use in transplants. From a report: It marks the first time that embryos combining two large, distantly-related species have been produced. The creation of this so-called chimera -- named after the cross-species beast of Greek mythology -- has been hailed as a significant first step towards generating human hearts, livers and kidneys from scratch. Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, who led the work on the part-pig, part-human embryos at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, said: "The ultimate goal is to grow functional and transplantable tissue or organs, but we are far away from that. This is an important first step." The study has reignited ethical concerns that have threatened to overshadow the field's clinical promise. The work inevitably raises the spectre of intelligent animals with humanised brains and also the potential for bizarre hybrid creatures to be accidentally released into the wild. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) placed a moratorium on funding for the controversial experiments last year while these risks were considered.
dare I say... (Score:5, Funny)
man-bear-pig?
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Well we're two thirds of the way there. Give it another couple of years.
Re: dare I say... (Score:5, Funny)
You mean two halves of the way there.
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Sounds more like the time the Daleks took Manhattan [wikipedia.org], but pigs and bears are related so I'm sure we'll get to the third step soon. Is Al Gore a Dr. Who fan? I thought he would be rooting for the cybermen, err women?
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Er.... South Pork
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- Al Gore
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But are you super cereal?
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Re: dare I say... (Score:1)
I'm sorry I wrote these nasty words. My Mom just finished explaining to me why it is inappropriate and I am really sorry. She told me to apologize if I don't want to be grounded for the rest of the week. I feel really bad. I don't know why I say these things. I just need a friend and I thought this would make me look cool.
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That was the most powerful propaganda piece in human history.
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We need to seal off the cave of the winds to keep him in!
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man-bear-pig?
You bastard, you stole my line!
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Look no further (Score:1, Funny)
than the White House.
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So what you're saying is Trump is more diverse than Obummer? Cool.
Train keeps going.
Almost every President seems to be worse than the one before him... ... I'm not sure how we're going to trump Trump though. Kanye West 2020? Charlie Sheen 2024? Satan 2028?
Two references already to Man-Bear-Pig (Score:1)
...but not one to Margaret Atwood? Don't forget the pigoons from Oryx and Crake [wikipedia.org]* which were created specifically for organ transplantation.
* IMNSHO one of the best sci-fi works o
Re:Two references already to Man-Bear-Pig (Score:4, Funny)
Slashdot is just full of uncultured swine. ;-)
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Don't you mean, uncultured bear-swine?
Re:Two references already to Man-Bear-Pig (Score:5, Informative)
The Hyperpigs in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series were also human-pig chimeras created originally for human transplant organs;
"The soldier whipped the blanket away from the huddled figure.
The prisoner, crouched into a small foetal shape, squealed against the sudden intrusion of light, hiding its dark-adapted eyes.
Clavain stared. The prisoner was nothing that he had been expecting. At first glance it might have been taken for an adolescent human, for the proportions and size were roughly analogous. A naked human at that - unclothed pink human-looking flesh folded away into the hole. There was a horrid expanse of burned skin around its upper arm, all ridges and whorls of pink and deathly white.
Clavain was looking at a hyperpig; a genetic chimera of pig and human...
Somewhere before the dawn of the Demarchist era, in the twenty-first or twenty-second century, not far from the time of Clavain's own birth, a spectrum of human genes had been spliced into those of the domestic pig. The intention had been to optimise the ease with which organs could be transplanted between the two species, enabling pigs to grow body parts that could be harvested later for human utilisation... The genetic intervention had gone too far, achieving not just cross-species compatibility but something entirely unexpected: intelligence. " From Redemption Ark, by Alastair Reynolds, 2002
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I don't see what is so intrinsically different about sharing the planet with a different intelligent species. For most of H. sapiens' existence we shared it with other human species. In our fantasies of places like Middle Earth we share it with other intelligent species... not to mention Narnia.
We're not exactly doing a terrific job coexisting with other people of our species that have different opinions from us. That suggests our problems are cultural, not biological.
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Before our descendants reach the point where they can grow pigs for transplantation, a means of growing organs without bodies will be invented.
Our descendants? I'm not sure how old you are, but it might be in our lifetime. There was just an article about scientists using a rat-mouse chimera to grow a mostly mouse pancreas. This was used to transplant cells into diabetic mice and cure their diabetes.
I mean why grow a whole pig, when all you want is the heart?
1, growing a pig is an easy, well documented process. 2, you might want multiple organs from the pig.
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free bacon as a bonus
Does this qualify as cannibalism?
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Only half way.
So long as after I get my new unclogged heart (Score:1)
I can have bacon made from my donor pig, I'm good.
Don't make the obvious mean joke (Score:5, Funny)
Show respect for the office.
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Show respect for the office.
I applaud you, Sir...for I was going to make some variant of the joke, but indeed your appeal to reason did work. Still, the temptation remains strong; it's hard to keep the respect for the office when the one who holds the office himself seems to lack such respect. But yeah...the higher road is like that, isn't it?
Bravo, Sir, bravo!
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Are they working on an orangutan chimera? If so, I know a good place to start.
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Obama and Hillary voted to expand the wall while senators, so are you describing them?
Re:details (Score:1)
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Obvious? The obvious joke to a normal human would be a "The Island of Doctor Moreau" reference.
I had to google to find otherwise. South Park? I had kids and watched them grow in adults since that show was funny.
Next you'll be telling me The Simpsons or Family Guy is still in production.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Doctor Who as well. But my guess is that PopeRatzo is making the racist reference towards our outgoing president, which isn't very kind.
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He's not a pig, but the annoying orange, after it grew arms and legs.
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No, that's David Cameron.
this is G.E.L.F space! (Score:2)
death....to the stranger.
Larson was right? (Score:2)
yawn... seems sloppy (Score:2)
Bonus points when you can make the tissue grow into any design you want. I want my 200 year rated super heart.
And the chimera's first word was (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And the chimera's first word was (Score:4, Informative)
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Old News (Score:2)
The human/pig has been around for a while now, and even has her own tv show. Here's what she looks like now. [tvinsider.com]
Doctor Who (Score:2)
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There were other experiments [wikia.com] in the field.
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Also, the "alien" ship that crashed in London, destroying Big Ben yet again.
LunchTime (Score:3)
Isn't this going backwards..? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Dr. Eugene McCarthy is a Ph.D. geneticist who has made a career out of studying hybridization in animals. He now curates a biological information website called Macroevolution.net where he has amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that human origins can be best explained by hybridization between pigs and chimpanzees."
https://phys.org/news/2013-07-... [phys.org]
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the "direction of the cross" would likely have been a male boar or pig (Sus scrofa) with a female chimp (Pan troglodytes), and the offspring would have been nurtured by a chimp mother among chimpanzees. there's even a creepy possibility that hybridization might even still be occurring in regions where Sus and Pan still seem to come into contact, like Southern Sudan.
I didn't know that pigs and chimpanzees come in contact with each other that way, and it's still a little hard to believe.
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but bacon is delicious...
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No, it makes no sense. It doesn't even make nonsense.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyn... [scienceblogs.com]
> The primate and artiodactyl lineages have diverged for roughly 80 million years — just the gradual accumulation of molecular differences in sperm and egg recognition proteins would mean that pig sperm wouldn’t recognize a chimpanzee egg as a reasonable target for fusion. Heck, even two humans will have these sorts of mating incompatibilities. Two species that haven’t had any intermingling populations
Do not need to use human cells (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of the issues they appear to be studying do not require the use of human cells. For example, they talk about not knowing what would happen if the animal were to complete gestation since pigs only gestate for 112 days, but human embryos gestate for 9 months.
Well, then use two different animals that have vastly different gestation periods, and see what happens. You don't need to use human cells to find that out.
They also talk about not knowing whether or not the cells would migrate to the brain.
Again, use something else. Like, a mouse and an elephant. Or whatever.
It seems premature to be using human cells in these experiments if they haven't already answered these questions with other animal chimeras.
Which makes me wonder, why are they using human cells at all? Are they just going for headlines or what?
Re:Do not need to use human cells (Score:5, Informative)
They are using human cells because they want to be able to grow a human kidney, lung, heart, pancreas, etc. and transplant them into people that need them.
The current wait for a kidney is almost 10 years in certain states. Average life expectancy on dialysis is 5 years. You do the math.
The procedure works as follows. Take the human cells and break the genes that make neurons. Take the pig embryonic cells and break the genes that makes kidneys. Add a single human cell to the pig embryos. You get a pig that's brain is 100% pig, whose kidneys are 100% human, and the rest of the body is 95% pig, 5% human. Take the kidney and transplant to a human in need.
Like me for example.
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But it sounds like they're not doing the experiments in the right order. They're starting with human cells which end up leaving more questions unanswered because they can't carry the experiments out the way they would be able to with pure animal cells. If they started with pure animal cells they could answer the more fundamental questions quickly and this could lead them to more quickly answering the remaining questions using human cells.
I guess they could do all this in parallel though, which I hope they
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Take the human cells and break the genes that make neurons
Easy, if we knew exactly which genes controlled the development of the human brain. We don't, we can make educated and informed guesses but do we know if there is a enzyme or protein that is produced by human cells that triggers the development of higher cognitive functions?
And what if the creature did develop higher brain functions? Pigs are already pretty smart, what if one of these test subjects scratches "No kill I" in the dirt?
That said I agree that we have to keep doing research into this, the ben
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Then that one doesn't get killed, and the procedure for treating the human cells is improved so it doesn't happen again.
And that specimen is studied intensively of course... In an environment of its choosing so it is as happy as it can be.
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So, just like us regular humans then?
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From TFA:
âoeWe didnâ(TM)t see any human cells in the brain region, but we cannot exclude the possibility that they may have gone to the brain,â said Izpisua Belmonte.
It might not actually be necessary to turn the genes that contribute to brain development off, if it can be shown that no significant amount of human cells go that region.
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Additionally, given that there is no such thing as a "gene that makes kidneys" or a "gene that makes neurons", only "genes that make proteins", I expect you'd have to very subtly change a whole lot of genes in order to actually selectively stop just one kind of organ generation, and even then you'd probably get an imperfect version of that organ.
I thought they were just trying to make the pig "human enough" that its kidneys would work, as piggy as they still might be, in a human.
But you know, I really ought
1 in 10,000 cells or not, that's some creepy shit (Score:4)
I mean, it's not "Island of Dr. Moreau" level creepy, but it's a start.
That animals first words? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ki...llll.....mee....eeee
facilities (Score:3, Funny)
How far? (Score:2)
"The ultimate goal is to grow functional and transplantable tissue or organs, but we are far away from that. This is an important first step."
If they are already growing human organs, how much farther do they have to go before they are transplantable?
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Having an organ grow in a pig can result in many environmental differences in how the organ turns out. E.g. a pig is smaller and may not "exercise" the heart enough to make it useable in humans. There is also the issue of removing all the pig from the organ for a clean transplant.
Disease (Score:2)
You can grow genetically pure pigs in a sterile environment. They do this already with flies, to use maggots to clean out necrotic tissue in ulcers. Gross, but it works incredibly well.
Wait... (Score:1)
forget human-pig.... (Score:2)
When do we get Spider Pig?
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You mean like Peter Porker, the Amazing Spider-Ham?
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Not Brains...Boobs! (Score:2)
Why in god's name would I want a Pig's body with a Human brain?
Instead, let me raise a Human body (Female for me please) with the brain of, say, a Bonobo monkey.
Intelligent animals are unlikely (Score:4, Insightful)
There are many animals that are quite intelligent, but it's exceedingly unlikely that we would ever have the capability to genetically engineer an animal like a pig to have a human-like brain, even if we wanted to.
The reason is simple: our brains are way bigger than pig brains (human brain: about 3.5lbs, pig brain: 0.4lbs). In order to have a pig with a human-like brain, you'd have to completely reshape it's skull, and because a pig skull is very different from an ape skull, you'd have to do it in a very different way than humans do. To do this, you'd need to generate a wide variety of novel adaptations to make it so that a pig can support a brain that's about 8 times the size. That's just not happening.
What is being done in these kinds of experiments is far less ambitious: to use small amounts of human DNA to make animal tissues compatible for transplantation. This kind of research has gone on for a long time: it's common to genetically engineer mice and rats to have human immune systems, to make them better test subjects. In this case, if the research continues, you'll have a pig growing a pig liver, with some of its genetic markers changed just enough to fool a human body into thinking that it's a human liver rather than a pig liver.
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Fortunately, the goal is to create a human with a pig's brain. That way we can harvest its delicious blood and organs while only be technically be killing a pig (which we do *quite* a lot of anyway).
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Fortunately, the goal is to create a human with a pig's brain. That way we can harvest its delicious blood and organs while only be technically be killing a pig (which we do *quite* a lot of anyway).
That's already happened.
The big surprise to the scientific community was that they can vote.
Better Bacon? (Score:2)
I wonder what it tastes like?
Humans taste like pork...
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I wonder what it tastes like?
Humans taste like pork...
Long pig.
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Uplift them animals! (Score:2)
Rat/Mouse chimera for pancreas (Score:2)
And the first thing he asked? (Score:2)
The best panties in the whole world.
Colds (Score:1)
Anyone hungry...... (Score:2)
For some bbq baby-back ribs?
Mice-Humans a long time ago (Score:2)
We've been creating mice with human immune systems for probably decades now. Heck, you can even order them from commercial suppliers:
https://www.jax.org/jax-mice-a... [jax.org]
Life imitates art? (Score:2)
http://beautifuldecay.com/2013... [beautifuldecay.com]
New breed of muslims. (Score:1)
New breed of muslims.
I worked for this guy! (Score:2)
Nostradamus was right ! (Score:2)
The scourges passed the world shrinks,
For a long time peace and populated lands:
One will travel safely by air, land, sea and wave,
Then the wars stirred up anew. (C I â" 63)
They will think they have seen the Sun at night
When they will see the pig half-man:
Noise, song, battle, fighting in the sky perceived,
And one will hear brute beasts talking. (C I â" 64)
I dunno... (Score:1)
I think Rosie O'Donnel's parents created the first Human-Pig hybrid...
What Bacon has done for science... (Score:2)
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C'mon people, Francis Bacon [wikipedia.org] one of the people who devised scientific method, get it.
Redwall Abbey, here I come (Score:1)
We humans are generally too not ready... (Score:1)
Consider this example: Africanized bees. Theye were inadvertently released into the wild and now have taken lives here in the USA.
Those bees continue to migrate further north and pose a threat to an ever increasing population.
Add to this one example the fact that an obvious unqualified Trump made it to being a presidential candidate (let alone actually now in office), and it is quite evident that we humans are akin to an ape with a machine gu
This is horrifying (Score:1)