[IndigoErth]

So... future Bebop?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2...ealth-science/


Human-Pig Hybrid Created in the Lab—Here Are the Facts
Scientists hope the chimera embryos represent key steps toward life-saving lab-grown organs.


In a remarkable—if likely controversial—feat, scientists announced today that they have created the first successful human-animal hybrids. The project proves that human cells can be introduced into a non-human organism, survive, and even grow inside a host animal, in this case, pigs.

This biomedical advance has long been a dream and a quandary for scientists hoping to address a critical shortage of donor organs.





The team then took stem cells from rats and injected them into pig blastocysts. This version failed—not surprisingly, since rats and pigs have dramatically different gestation times and evolutionary ancestors.

But pigs have a notable similarity to humans. Though they take less time to gestate, their organs look a lot like ours.

Not that these similarities made the task any easier. The team discovered that, in order to introduce human cells into the pigs without killing them, they had to get the timing just right.

“We tried three different types of human cells, essentially representing three different times” in the developmental process, explains Jun Wu, a Salk Institute scientist and the paper’s first author. Through trial and error, they learned that naïve pluripotent cells—stem cells with unlimited potential—didn’t survive as well as ones that had developed a bit more.

When those just-right human cells were injected into the pig embryos, the embryos survived. Then they were put into adult pigs, which carried the embryos for between three and four weeks before they were removed and analyzed.