Human-animal hybrids have been subject to countless Fantasy-, Mythology- and Science Fiction Stories.
Whether that's a Centaur, a Sphinx, a Faun, a Harpy or even a Mermaid, the thought of a creature that combines both human and animal features has fascinated mankind for thousands of years.
Now, scientists have created the first real life human-pig hybrid embryos!
Okay, we are still far from having creatures that are half pig/half human walking the streets.
But still, it's a scientific breakthrough that proves a procedure like this would at least be possible!
The purpose of this experiment was to create lab-grown creatures whose organs could later be transplanted.
According to national geographic, "Every ten minutes, a person is added to the national waiting list for organ transplants. And every day, 22 people on that list die without the organ they need."
The number of people who have an organ donor card are way too low compared to the high demand for organs, so growing our own organs in a lab would be a very helpful solution to this dilemma.
“The ultimate goal is to grow functional and transplantable tissue or organs, but we are far away from that. This is an important first step.”-Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, leading scientist at Salk Institute, La Jolla
Injection of human iPS cells into a pig blastocyst
To be scientifically correct, the researchers from the Salk Institute created a "Chimera": An organism that contains cells from two different species.
Human stem cells were injected into pig embryos, which then grew into chimeras that were mostly big but had small human parts of about 1 in 10,000 cells.The breaking study created a controversy around intelligent animal-hybrid creatures that could be released into the wild and harm others.
That's also the reason why the experiments were privately funded, and not supported by the US National Institutes of Health.
Izpisua Belmonte says that although he can understand the controversy and the fear around these experiments, yet they are still far from creating a hybrid creature that could run around freely.
Salk Institute scientists and authors Jun Wu and Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte
The pig embryos that had human stem cells successfully implanted were developing for 28 days before then being killed. 28 days is the first trimester of a pig's pregnancy duration.
The reason for this short amount of time was to avoid the ethical problems that come with hybrids:
“This is long enough for us to try to understand how the human and pig cells mix together early on without raising ethical concerns about mature chimeric animals”-Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, leading scientist at Salk Institute, La Jolla
The next step in this study would be to geneticaly modify the pig embryos with CRISPR, so that they won't produce organs. Instead, scientists hope to grow human organs then.
But there are still many different challenges to face until the scientists can reach their goal of growing fully-implantable organs - one potential problem for example is that a pig pregnancy only lasts 112 days.
So the pig embryo evolves at a completely different speed compared to a human one, and it's a tough challenge to get the timing perfectly right.
It may be a controversial study that raises many ethical questions, but if it becomes successful and scientists would be able to grow custom organs for transplantation, the benefits are enormous.
And along the way, the researchers are learning more about the evolution and embryogenesis of species in general.
"Of course, the ultimate goal of chimeric research is to learn whether we can use stem-cell and gene-editing technologies to generate genetically-matched human tissues and organs, and we are very optimistic that continued work will lead to eventual success. But in the process we are gaining a better understanding of species evolution as well as human embryogenesis and disease that is difficult to get in other ways."-Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, leading scientist at Salk Institute, La Jolla
What's your opinion on this experiment?
Images: 1, 2, 3, 4, Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
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