Aakancha Shaw, St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata
In an attempt to investigate how the monkey embryos and human embryos function alongside, scientists discovered the world’s first monkey embryos containing human cells. Fascinating, right?
The embryos were derived from a macaque and then injected with human stem cells in the lab, these were then allowed to grow for 20 days before being destroyed. It is believed that part-human chimaeras—essentially animal bodies that have been incorporated with some human organs or other characteristics—might one day offer clues and help us treat human diseases, as well as providing organs to transplant to humans.
The term for this type of life form is a chimaera, It is hoped that human-monkey chimaeras could be created to study parts of the brain, for instance, so we can better understand and treat Alzheimer’s disease. Another motive is to grow human organs for transplantation by maybe “deleting” the relevant organ from the animal’s genetic makeup, and then replacing it with human stem cells for the filling of the developmental niche.
Previously, researchers have explored this idea in pigs because it was seen as an ideal animal since their organs are about the same size as humans. However, the research failed because not enough human cells “took” to create a functional chimaera.
Since monkeys are evolutionarily closer to us, there’s a greater chance that cells will interact effectively with each other and the experiment might be a big success. The goal of these experiments i.e.human-monkey experiments is to perfect the development of chimaeras in primates before the technology is transferred to pigs or mammals.
Whether part-primate or part-pig, living chimaeras that feature human cells can certainly be a possibility in the future. Now how such animals would look and function would depend on the numbers of nonhuman and human cells.
In a previous experiment, for instance, a goat-sheep entity that had both woolly and coarse hair.
Now comes the question of moral status, moral status implies mental capacities such as consciousness, moral capacities, self-consciousness, and rationality. In the future, various human-nonhuman chimaeras could pose a challenge because of the variation in the mental capacity of ordinary animals and humans. Hence, it becomes a problem for those who are striving to determine the moral status of living creatures. The issue of moral status can be seen as both, a philosophical one and an ethical one.
However, extensive research in this area would answer all the questions. New researches show that this field is in dire need of attention.
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