No!-No! For a popular science fiction movie, this is not a teaser. These are evidence that scientists from China have given to us. And yes, the title is correct: embryos that are part human and partly ape, in other words, human hybrids or a human-monkey chimaera, have been developed by a team of researchers. Pick that sounds best to you.
Their ultimate aim is, through surprising experiments, to create an animal with a fully human kidney or liver. The goal of these controversial experiments is the possibility of using such primates as sources of transplantation organs.
The procedure involves injecting a one-day-old embryo with human embryonic stem cells. The expectation is that, along with the embryo, human cells will develop. An effort was made some time ago to introduce human cells to pig embryos, but the former was not successfully retained.
Similar genetic endowments of monkeys to those of humans were the hope for success in the present experiments. Scientists are now using gene editing technology to give human cells a better chance of persistence and growth. They therefore prohibited the development in animal embryos of certain types of cells. No monkeys have been born with mixed genes so far. The mixed embryos, instead, were developed in the laboratory in just two weeks in 2019.
Reportedly, the creature was able to evolve and be born, but the process was disrupted by scientists. The team, made up of representatives from the United States Salk Center for Biological Studies and the Catholic University of Murcia, succeeded in genetically altering the embryos of monkeys.
The researchers deactivated and replaced the genes making up the organs with human stem cells. They hope these hybrid organs can be transplanted into humans one day.
A researcher from previous experiments with pigs, on the other hand, claims that current experiments will not lead to success, because the organs that will grow will be small. Federal funds will never be used in the United States to build mixed human-ape embryos. In China, however, there is no such law, which is possibly why research is being carried out there.