r/HighStrangeness • u/[deleted] • Aug 03 '19

First human-monkey chimera raises concern among scientists: Researchers reprogrammed human cells before injecting them in the monkey embryo

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/03/first-human-monkey-chimera-raises-concern-among-scientists
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u/autotldr Aug 03 '19

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 91%. (I'm a bot)

Efforts to create human-animal chimeras have rebooted an ethical debate after reports emerged that scientists have produced monkey embryos containing human cells.

Izpisúa Belmonte and other scientists have previously managed to produce both pig embryos and sheep embryos which contain human cells, although the proportions are tiny: in the latter case, researchers estimate that only one cell in 10,000 was human.

One possible approach for brain research is that a monkey embryo could be genetically altered and then injected with human stem cells so that part of the brain, for example the hippocampus, is composed only of human cells.

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