According to Nature , a committee of the Japanese Ministry of Science signed through scientists’ requests for the development of human pancreas on animals. This is the first time a country’s government has allowed the creation of animal embryos from human stem cells.
This makes many people worry that a kind of human intellectual animal will appear in the near future. However, it also opens up a new future for patients who need organ transplants.
"In the end, we were able to study seriously after 10 years of preparation," Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who led the study, told the Asahi Shimbun .
Scientists do this kind of research in the hope that someday they will create human organs that can be assembled from common animals, such as pigs. People will harvest organs from pigs as they cut their meat in the food industry.
For this study, Nakauchi’s team will produce rodent embryos that cannot self-develop the pancreas. They then introduced human stem cells with the goal of creating embryos to develop pancreas from human cells.
However, Nakauchi told Nature that they plan carefully to not create a human-like animal. If there are too many human cells in the hybrid brain, they will temporarily cancel the experiment.
"We are trying to ensure that human cells only contribute to the creation of certain organs," Nakauchi explained.
This is not the first time humans have created animal embryos from human cells. In 2018, Stanford University researchers successfully fabricated sheep embryos and the first. It was destroyed only after 28 days because the hybrid did not contain organs. At the same time, Amerasians have only 1 / 10,000 human cells.
In 2017, Carolyn Neuhaus, a medical ethic at the Hastings Center, told Gizmodothat scientists need to step back and have moral discussions when breeding humans with animals.
