Scientists create sheep that's 15% human

[Soldier4Christ]

Scientists create sheep that's 15% human 
Creature has body of animal, but half-human organs

Scientists have created the world's first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.


The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells - and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer.

Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep's foetus.

He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep.

The process would involve extracting stem cells from the donor's bone marrow and injecting them into the peritoneum of a sheep's foetus. When the lamb is born, two months later, it would have a liver, heart, lungs and brain that are partly human and available for transplant.

"We would take a couple of ounces of bone marrow cells from the patient,' said Prof Zanjani, whose work is highlighted in a Channel 4 programme tomorrow.

"We would isolate the stem cells from them, inject them into the peritoneum of these animals and then these cells would get distributed throughout the metabolic system into the circulatory system of all the organs in the body. The two ounces of stem cell or bone marrow cell we get would provide enough stem cells to do about ten foetuses. So you don't just have one organ for transplant purposes, you have many available in case the first one fails."

At present 7,168 patients are waiting for an organ transplant in Britain alone, and two thirds of them are expected to die before an organ becomes available.

Scientists at King's College, London, and the North East Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle have now applied to the HFEA, the Government's fertility watchdog, for permission to start work on the chimeras.

But the development is likely to revive criticisms about scientists playing God, with the possibility of silent viruses, which are harmless in animals, being introduced into the human race.

Dr Patrick Dixon, an international lecturer on biological trends, warned: "Many silent viruses could create a biological nightmare in humans. Mutant animal viruses are a real threat, as we have seen with HIV."

Animal rights activists fear that if the cells get mixed together, they could end up with cellular fusion, creating a hybrid which would have the features and characteristics of both man and sheep. But Prof Zanjani said: "Transplanting the cells into foetal sheep at this early stage does not result in fusion at all."

[Soldier4Christ]

Interspecies replication proposed 
Goal is to eliminate need for women to donate eggs for copying human embryos

It was nearly a decade ago that Jose Cibelli plugged his own DNA into a cow's egg in a novel cloning attempt that was condemned as unethical by President Clinton and landed the Michigan State University researcher in a mess of controversy.

Even though Cibelli and his colleagues patented the so-called interspecies cloning technique, they soon abandoned the research as a failure and the uproar subsided.

Now the tempest is brewing all over again.

At least three respected teams of British scientists have reignited the moral debate over inserting human genes into animal eggs by proposing experiments similar to Cibelli's.

Their goal is to eliminate the need for women to donate eggs for the cloning of human embryos, a research goal they say will enable them to better understand the genetic causes of many diseases and design personalized medicines.

Currently, the few scientists actively pursuing human cloning are hobbled by a nearly nonexistent human egg supply. And each researcher will need thousands of them.

"Getting eggs from women is the bottleneck to cloning," Cibelli said. "An alternative would be welcomed."

All three U.K. teams aim to get around that bottleneck by taking DNA from patients sick with a disease like Alzheimer's and fuse it with cow eggs that have had all their genetic material removed. The hope is that the human DNA will trick the eggs into thinking they're pregnant, beginning development.

After about five days of growth, the cloned embryos would be destroyed and the stem cells extracted. The stem cells would be grown in their labs and the researchers could look for the onset of diseases, study their development and test experimental drugs on the cells.

"You can model Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease in a dish," said Stephen Minger, director of the Stem Cell Laboratory at King's College in London.

Minger's request for a government license to use cow eggs instead of women's eggs to generate human embryonic stem cells stirred significant controversy in the United Kingdom last year. His application with the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority—along with another from Lyle Armstrong of the North East England Stem Cell Institute—is expected to be ruled on later this year.

UK researchers are required to obtain government licenses to work with human embryonic stem cells. No such restrictions exist in the United States, though President Bush banned federal funding for most such research in this country.

Ian Wilmut, the UK researcher who cloned Dolly the sheep in 1997, said that if British government approves licenses for Minger and Armstrong, he'll apply for a third.

"What has been overlooked in the cloning debate is the huge benefit it could have in drug discovery," said Wilmut.

He and Minger were among the noted cloning experts who attended a research meeting earlier this month in San Francisco. They and other scientists who have proposed doing such work argue it is an essential step in developing new sources for human embryonic stem cells and have vowed never to create a living animal through interspecies mixing.

But the work is still viewed as immoral by social conservatives.

"It is treating a human being at his or her earliest stages as a mere tool," said Georgetown University philosophy professor Alfonso Gomez- Lobo, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics.

"The destruction of such an organism does not change the moral wrongness of the initial action," said Gomez-Lobo, who called the research "a violation of human dignity."

Scientists say human cloning can help cure diseases, or at least help us better understand them. Extracting and observing the growth of stem cells from an embryo cloned from an ailing patient will give them unrivaled insight into how diseases develop.

The problem is how to obtain the eggs. Cloning is notoriously inefficient; only 3 percent to 4 percent of animal eggs used in cloning procedures result in live births, and no one has ever credibly reported cloning a human embryo. The field was thrown into turmoil in 2005 when Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk's claim that he'd cloned a human embryo was exposed as a fraud.

And for a woman, donating eggs is a significant undertaking and requires taking hormone injections, which can be risky.

"You cannot in good faith justify women undergoing this procedure for no medical benefit," Minger said. "These eggs for the most part are going to be wasted."

Scientists have been successful in a handful of interspecies cloning projects involving closely related species, including creating a wild ox called a banteng in a cow's egg.

But Cibelli, who will soon publish data in a scientific journal detailing his failure to clone monkey genes in a cow eggs, doubts the proposed experiments will work.

"It could be that we are doing something wrong," Cibelli said. "But it looks like the farther apart the species are on the evolutionary tree, the harder it will be to clone."

[Faithin1]

This is sheer lunacy!  There is no telling how many 'monsters' are currently in laboratories.