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The cross-species approach is to advance human vaccine research for the benefit of veterinary vaccines and vice versa, with researchers collaborating to unlock shared biological mechanisms underlying disease immunity, thereby accelerating the design and development of vaccines across species. This grafting of man and beast to recombine their DNA more closely, and the merging of different species to study disease through GOF or chimeric research, is also advancing the One Health Initiative that seeks to produce a cross-species vaccine for both human and animals. Scientists are also looking to human-animal chimeras with a “humanized” immune system to test vaccines. For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has funded a project at Peking University through its Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative to develop a ” humanized” chimeric mouse model to develop vaccines for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV). However, this raises many ethical questions, given that the brain is the center of cognition and reflection. For example, should the human-animal hybrid develop a human-like nervous system capable of consciousness, at what point then does a chimeric brain become less monkey, and more human?Īs Dr Judy Illes, professor of neurology and Canada research chair in neuroethics at the University of British Columbia, asked: “Why humanize a monkey, if that’s what we need to do? If that’s justified scientifically, then we just need to be doing the experiment on humans. We don’t need to do it on a humanized monkey.” Some scientists propose humanizing large portions of the monkey brain, such as the hippocampus, to be entirely human-derived, in order to study human neurological disorders. In April 2019, Chinese researchers inserted into monkey embryos a human gene critical for human brain development. Now, Alzheimer researchers want to go a step further and are proposing using human-monkey chimeras to give monkeys a human brain. The approach is based on taking human cells and reprogramming them to become stem cells, which are introduced into the embryo of another species.
![monkey human chimera monkey human chimera](https://scx1.b-cdn.net/csz/news/500a/2021/firsthumanmo.jpg)
Scientists see chimeras as a potential way to address the shortage of organs such as kidneys, livers and hearts for transplantation, and believe organs genetically matched to a particular human recipient could one day be grown inside animals. Last December, a team of scientists in Beijing brought to term a pig-monkey chimera.Ī four-week-old pig embryo injected with human pluripotent stem cells, Salk Institute. Not only has this team of Spanish, American and Chinese scientists created a human-monkey chimera, but Professor Belmonte also created a human-pig embryo in the past.
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Their report was published in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, revealing the research was conducted in China “ to avoid legal issues.” In the US, the NIH bans federal funding to create human-monkey embryos, while in Canada, putting non-human stem cells into human embryos is a criminal offense under the Assisted Human Reproduction Act.Ĭhina is thus viewed as a dumping ground and giant test tube for all kinds of dangerous and ethically controversial research outlawed by Western countries, similar to how it became a dumping ground for recyclable waste in past decades. Because of more stringent regulations of public health and bioethics in the US and other Western countries, American and European scientists tend to outsource GOF and chimeric research to China, where it does not face such restrictions.įor example, when the Chinese Academy of Science’s Kunming Institute of Zoology created the first human-monkey chimera in July 2019, the project was led by a Spanish scientist, Professor Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, from the American Salk Institute in San Diego, in collaboration with the Murcia Catholic University in Murcia, Spain.