Chimera Industry of Mixing Human and Non-Human Cells Gains Traction
Posted on 05/30/2020
In 1896, English author H. G. Wells published the early science fiction classic “The Island of Doctor Moreau”. The book is about a shipwrecked man who visits the home of Doctor Moreau, a mad scientist who creates human-like hybrid beings from animals through vivisection. In 1984, researchers in a chimera experimentation did a chimeric sheep–goat through combining embryos from a goat and a sheep.
A joint team at the State University of New York and the Roswell Park Cancer Centre created a human-mouse hybrid organism. The creature was around 4% human cells. Scientists call these hybrid embryos a chimera. In the study, the researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo injected 10 to 12 human stem cells into developing mouse embryos. This human-mouse chimera has by far the highest number of human cells ever recorded in an animal, according to researchers. The researches discovered in the creature that the human cells learned from the mouse cells and developed much more faster than expected. Humans develop in the womb at a much slower pace than mice. There thesis was that they wanted the human pluripotent stem cells to behave like the mouse pluripotent stem cells, and that the human cells should mingle well with the mouse stem cells in a mouse blastocyst.
