Now that the "human-monkey embryo" that can survive for 20 days has arrived, it is hoped that the clear boundaries of globally recognized ethics and laws will not come too late.
Written by | Phoenix
For the first time, humans have created a "human-monkey embryo" that survives for 20 days! On April 15, the research results of this cooperation between Chinese and American scientists were published in the top international scientific journal Cell.
Some see it as a remarkable advance in scientific research and praise it for its potential to improve the health of all human lives; some argue that this is a huge ethical risk, which is tantamount to pushing humanity to the precipice of "making monsters". Is it a blessing or a curse?
A "milestone" in similar research
The joint research team is from Kunming University of Science and Technology in China and the Salk Institute of Biology in the United States. Human pluripotent stem cells have the potential to differentiate into a variety of tissues and organs, and this study is to inject human pluripotent stem cells into the embryos of crab-eating monkeys (also known as "long-tailed macaques") to cultivate "human-monkey chimeric embryos".
Crab-eating monkeys
The researchers selected 132 IVF and developed to day 6 cynomolgus monkey embryos and injected 25 pluripotent stem cells from humans into each one.
One day after the injection, human-derived cells appeared in all 132 monkey embryos. By day 10, 111 chimeric embryos grow normally. After that, the survival rate of these embryos gradually decreased, with a sharp decrease on day 15.
On day 19, only 3 of the surviving chimeric embryos remained. On day 20, all embryos die and the experiment ends.
In this experiment, not only has the survival rate of chimeric embryos improved compared with similar previous studies, but the proportion of human cells in "human-monkey embryos" has also reached 2%-7%.
"Creating Adam"? The colored spheres in the figure are images of "human-monkey chimeric embryos". Source: Ji Weizhi, Kunming University of Science and Technology.