A Human-Animal Hybrid

[crazy-mike]

http://www.australasianbioethics.org...11-14.html#top
NY DOC READY FOR WOMB TRANSPLANT
A New York hospital has given the green light for a womb transplant -- even though the only human transplant a few years ago failed and the only successful transplant on a non-human primate was monitored for a mere 20 hours. Dr Giuseppe Del Priore, of New York Downtown Hospital, plans to do another monkey transplant, but he says "if a person walked in tomorrow and requested a uterine transplant, I am cautiously optimistic that we could be successful". He feels that enough experimental work has been done to show that a womb transplant is safe for women. In any case, some surgeons bypass animal experiments to work on humans. A face transplant, first done in France last year, was not performed on a primate first.

Other experts disagree. In September, Richard Smith, of London's Hammersmith Hospital, said that he was two years away from succeeding. And Mats Brännström, of Sweden, says: " we have to do a lot more animal studies before we go on to humans". It could subject women to unnecessary risk, he says. ~ New Scientist, Nov 11
:evillaugh:
NAZIS' LOW-TECH GENETIC ENGINEERING REMEMBERED
For the first time, children raised in a Nazi program to breed blond, blue-eyed Aryans have met together as adults. Children from the Nazis' "Lebensborn", or "Font of Life", project gathered in the German town of Wernigerode to reflect on their origins.

Although the project has been well documented, many of the children never knew that they were part of it. Between 6,000 and 8,000 illegitimate children were placed in the home of Party members to create a breed of people that fitted the Nazis' physical ideal and could manage a future empire. The children were frequently selected for qualities the Nazis regarded as typically Aryan.

"This is the opposite example of the Holocaust," says Gisela Heidenreich, from Bavaria, whose mother was unmarried and whose father was a senior SS officer. "The idea was to further the Aryan race by whatever means were available." The first of these children to write a first-person account of Lebensborn, Ms Heidenreich says that this sinister program has parallels in contemporary interest in genetic engineering. Its evil must not be allowed to gather dust in history books, she says. "If we start engineering blond-haired, blue-eyed babies, can we blame just Hitler?"

Lebensborn was started in 1936 by Heinrich Himmler to counter Germany's declining birth rate and to assist families of the Nazi elite. There were 11 homes in Germany, several others scattered throughout Europe and possibly as many as 15 in Norway. ~ New York Times, Nov 7; BBC, Nov 4

[crazy-mike]

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/...70&in_a_source

Chimera: sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells
Now scientists create a sheep that's 15% human
By CLAUDIA JOSEPH - More by this author »
Last updated at 15:53pm on 27th March 2007

Scientists have created the world's first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.
The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells - and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer.
Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep's foetus.

[crazy-mike]

http://mikethemadbiologist.blogspot....n-experts.html
There's a commonly-held stereotype of the immoral or ammoral scientist who, for some reason, can not comprehend the ethical implications of his or her work:
In the stem cell debate, it often sounds to me as if there's an underlying assumption that the scientists themselves have not considered the implications and morality of their actions. Wrong. They have. In some, if not many cases, we're talking about people who have given up far more lucrative jobs (or jobs with more security) to find cures for horrible diseases, and yet, for some reason, these same people are considered morally defunct and should not be trusted when it comes to the philosophical and theological implications of their research.

I'm not arguing scientists should be trusted without question (except for the Mad Biologist, of course; never doubt the Mad Biologist). Yet the 'moral null hypothesis' is that these researchers, who want to perform research that would help others, have to justify their actions, and the opponents of stem cell research can simply chant "they're murdering embryos" without having to justify their beliefs at all, regardless of the consequences of these beliefs...

The moral burden of proof shouldn't be placed on the researchers; it should be placed on those who wish to stop them.
I would trust this administration more when it comes to science if they didn't despise scientists.

[crazy-mike]

[crazy-mike]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...440721,00.html
The Times November 07, 2006


Human-cow hybrid embryo planned
By Nigel Hawkes
Stem-cell researchers have applied to produce an embryo using an animal’s egg and a human cell


British scientists are to submit plans to create a hybrid embryo — part human, part cow.

They are to develop a way of creating stem cells that does not require human eggs, but the application seems likely to be met with controversy.

The team, from the University of Newcastle, would take a cow’s egg and remove the nucleus. They would then replace it with the nucleus of a cell taken from an adult human, such as a skin cell.



The hybrid would be overwhelmingly human — 99.9 per cent, according to the team, led by Lyle Armstrong, of the North East England Stem Cell Institute. The other 0.1 per cent would be animal.

The embryo would then be allowed to divide for six days, when the team would try to extract stem cells, which have many potential applications in medicine. The hybrid embryo would be destroyed, as all research embryos are, at 14 days.

The application will be made to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, although it is by no means clear that the research falls within its remit. Some experts claim that hybrids, because they are not 100 per cent human, are outside the law under which the HFEA was established.

In 2000 Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, recommended that the mixing of human adult cells with the live eggs of any animal species should not be permitted.

This was accepted by the Government, which said that it would bring forward primary legislation to effect this “when the parliamentary timetable allows”. No such legislation has been through Parliament, although the Government announced a review of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act last November.

The Select Committee on Science and Technology of the House of Commons disagreed with Sir Liam, saying that hybrids formed by nuclear transfer — the technique planned by the Newcastle team — may have value for deriving embryonic stem cells for research.

It recommended that any new legislation should define the nature of such embryos, make their creation legal for research purposes if they are destroyed after 14 days and prohibit them from being implanted in a woman.

Dr Armstrong said: “We are very hopeful that the HFEA will grant us permission for this work, which will help us to understand more about how cells behave after the nuclear transfer process.

“At the moment we don’t know if the nuclear transfer process works well enough in humans to create useful embryonic stem cells. We need to carry out many tests to establish this and, as animal eggs are freely available, it makes sense to use these. Stem-cell research promises huge potential medical advantages and we believe we will be working towards our ultimate goal of developing new patient therapies.”

Teams at the University of Edinburgh and Kings College London plan to seek permission for similar work. The HFEA said that it had yet to receive the Newcastle application, and could therefore not comment on it. But it indicated that, given the different opinions expressed on the subject of hybrids, any such application would require careful thought.

Dr Armstrong said that while there was still uncertainty whose responsibility it was, “If it isn’t the HFEA’s, I don’t know whose it is.” He said that it would be a valuable piece of research, aimed at discovering what it is about an egg cell that is able to “reprogramme” an adult cell so that it returns to an embryonic condition.

He said: “Human eggs are in short supply, and most come from women who are undergoing IVF. It’s a much better use of a scarce resource to use them to help them have children.” Cows’ eggs had been chosen, he said, because they are large enough to be easily manipulated, unlike those of, say, a mouse.

CELL HISTORY
Ian Wilmut, who created Dolly the sheep, was given a licence to clone human embryos in February last year

The first licence to clone human embryos was given to Alison Murdoch and Miodrag Stojkovic in 2004 for diabetes research. In May last year they said that they had created their first cloned embryo

The first pure nerve stem cells made from human embryonic stem cells were created last year, raising hopes for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s treatments

The North-East England Stem Cell Institute was given a licence in July that allows women to cut the cost of IVF treatment if they donate some of their eggs for cloning research

[crazy-mike]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../nembryo05.xml
Patients with currently incurable nervous system diseases will miss out on potentially life-saving new treatments if plans to ban experiments using part-human, part-animal embryos go ahead, according to a committee of MPs.

Members of the Science and Technology Select Committee have unanimously backed scientists and patients' groups in their opposition to Government proposals to block hybrid research.

In a report to be released today, the committee said such a ban would undermine the UK's leading position in stem cell research and science as a whole.

Teams of researchers based in London and Newcastle have applied for permission to create "cybrid" embryos that would be around 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent animal to produce embryonic stem cells - the body's building blocks that grow into all other types of cells.

They want to use the stem cells to understand and provide new treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cystic fibrosis, motor neurone disease and Huntington's.
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A draft Bill to replace the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 is being drawn up and is expected to be ready next month and is due to be included in the Queen's speech in November.

The Department of Health published a White Paper in December which stated: "The Government will propose that the creation of hybrid and chimera embryos in vitro, should not be allowed.

"However the Government also proposes that the law will contain a power enabling regulations to set out circumstances in which the creation of hybrid and chimera embryos in vitro may in future be allowed under licence, for research purposes only."

Last month Caroline Flint, the health minister, indicated ministers may rethink the contents of a draft Bill.

Tony Blair yesterday received a letter from 223 medical research charities and patient organisations calling for hybrid embryo research to be allowed to continue.

[crazy-mike]

http://himself.wordpress.com/2006/06...lling-kittens/
In 2003 Human DNA was successfully combined with rabbit (and
other animals), to create successful Chimera Hybrids.

[crazy-mike]

http://www.pharmaceutical-technology...wave_biotech2/
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[crazy-mike]

http://odeo.com/audio/2781933/view

In the 1920s, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin sent an animal-breeding expert to Africa in hopes of creating an army of half-man, half-monkey soldiers. Attempts both to inseminate women with monkey sperm and impregnate female chimpanzees with human sperm failed.
Где они это нашли? :evillaugh
Всё остальное - "в границах рационального" (коротко описаны "препятствия" для межвидового скрещивания):
November 15, 2006
Humanderthals! We mated with Neanderthals. Can we breed with other animals, too? By Torie Bosch

Last week, scientists announced that the human gene pool seems to include DNA from Neanderthals. That suggests that humans interbred with their primate cousins at some point before the Neanderthals went extinct about 30,000 years ago. Could we mate with other animals today?

;) С неандертальцами когда-то "удалось согрешить"....
Probably not. Ethical considerations preclude definitive research on the subject, but it’s safe to say that human DNA has become so different from that of other animals that interbreeding would likely be impossible. Groups of organisms tend to drift apart genetically when they get separated by geographical barriers—one might leave to find new food sources, or an earthquake could force them apart. When the two groups come back into contact with each other many, many years later, they may each have evolved to the point where they can no longer mate.

In general, two types of changes prevent animals from interbreeding. The first includes all those factors—called “pre-zygotic reproductive isolating mechanisms”—that would make fertilization impossible. After so many generations apart, a pair of animals might look so different from one another that they’re not inclined to have sex. (If we’re not even trying to mate with apes, we’ll never have half-human, half-monkey babies.) If the animals do try to get it on despite changed appearances, incompatible genitalia or sperm motility could pose another problem: A human spermatozoon may not be equipped to navigate the reproductive tract of a chimpanzee, for example.

The second type of barrier includes “post-zygotic reproductive isolating mechanisms,” or those factors that would make it impossible for a hybrid animal fetus to grow into a reproductive adult. If a human were indeed inclined and able to impregnate a monkey, post-zygotic mechanisms might result in a miscarriage or sterile offspring. The further apart two animals are in genetic terms, the less likely they are to produce viable offspring. At this point, humans seem to have been separate from other animals for far too long to interbreed. We diverged from our closest extant relative, the chimpanzee, as many as 7 million years ago. (For comparison, our apparent tryst with the Neanderthals occurred less than 700,000 years after we split off from them.)

Researchers haven’t pinned down exactly which mechanisms prevent interbreeding under most circumstances. Some closely related species can mate even if they have different numbers of chromosomes. Przewalski’s horse, for example, has 33 pairs of chromosomes instead of the 32 most horses have, but it can interbreed with regular equines anyway—the offspring takes the average and ends up with 65 chromosomes.

Neanderthals weren’t our ancestors’ only dalliance with other primates. “Pre-humans” and “pre-chimpanzees” interbred and gave birth to hybrids millions of years ago.

[crazy-mike]

http://www.intelligentagent.com/arch..._cattszurr.htm
Towards a New Class of Being:
The Extended Body
Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr

References:
[1] Research on two artistic projects involving the cultivation of plant and animal cells in the same environment currently is underway in SymbioticA; cell fusion between carrot and frog cells has been achieved in the 1970 by Harris.

[2] Written by Roger Morton as a response to The Last Word section in the New Scientist, June 10, 2006, No. 2555. This quote is taken from the response to the question, "When an insect is changing inside its cocoon, and has turned to slush, is it alive? And if so, in what way is it alive?," p.57. This is an interesting example as we can categorize the insect in its cocoon stage as a semi-living. However, this case is different from other semi-living explored in this thesis, as the insect in cocoon stage is not in need of an artificial support mechanism to survive and transform to the "fully living" state.

[3] http://www.dddmag.com/ShowPR.aspx?PU...00&PRODLETT=I;
Drag Discovery and Development, http://www.dddmag.com/default.aspx

[4] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bobde...gineering.html

[5] L. Andrews and D. Nelkin, Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age (Crown Publishers: New York, NY, 2001).

[6] C. Waldby and R. Mitchell, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Duke Universilty Press: Durham, NC, and London, UK, 2006).

[7] S. M. Squier, Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at Frontiers of Biomedicine (Duke University Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, 2004).

[8] R. Orwant, "Dawn of the Zombies," New Scientist No. 2553, May 27 (2006), p. 40.

[9] Eugene Thacker, The Global Genome - Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2005)

[10] François Delaporte (ed.), A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem (Zone Books: New York, NY, 1994), p.162.

[11] H. G. Wells, Julian S. Huxley, G. P. Wells, The Science of Life (1929), p. 27.

[12] H. Harris, "Roots: Cell fusion" in BioEssays 2: 4 (Wiley Periodicals, Inc., A Wiley Company, 1985), pp. 176 - 179.

[13] John Duns Scotus (vers 1266 - 1308). Haecceity (transliterated from the Latin haecceitas) is a term from medieval philosophy, first coined by Duns Scotus, which denotes the discrete qualities, properties, or characteristics of an object / person that make it a particular object / person. Haecceity is a person's or object's "thisness." Charles Peirce later used the term as a non-descriptive reference to an individual. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haecceity

[14] http://www.atcc.org/common/catalog/n...ccNum=CRL-1696. Little descriptive information about the origin of the McCoy cells appears in literature. They were first mentioned by Pomerat et al. [26143]. The cells were reported to have originated from the synovial fluid in the knee joint of a patient suffering from degenerative arthritis. In ca. 1965, Defendi et al., showed that McCoy cells (designated McCoy A) were indeed human cells. However, another sub-line (designated McCoy B) was, in fact, of mouse origin and possessed marker chromosomes characteristic of strain L mouse fibroblasts. McCoy cells that are presumed to be human, but actually are mouse cells have been disseminated from laboratory to laboratory throughout the world. Initial interest in McCoy cells followed the demonstration by Gordon and Quan [PubMed ID: 14268619] and Gordon et al. [PubMed ID: 4110420] that ionizing radiation (cobalt-60) greatly increased the susceptibility of McCoy cells to infection by chlamydia strains. A culture of the so-called McCoy cell line was received from the Center for Disease Control, Cell Culture Department, Atlanta, GA in March, 1984. Documentation of origin or passage history was not available. The cells have been used to propagate laboratory strains of the 15 recognized serotypes of Chlamydia trachomatis. The cell line has been satisfactory for chlamydia growth for at least 43 passages at ATCC. The cells are susceptible to chlamydia strains, and can be used to propagate chlamydia. Tested and found negative for ectromelia virus (mousepox).
MCCOY AND MCCOY-PLOVDIV CELL LINES IN EXPERIMENTAL AND DIAGNOSTIC PRACTICE – PAST, PRESENT AND PERSPECTIVES, Journal of Culture Collections, National Bank for Industrial Microorganisms and Cell Cultures, ISSN: 1310-8360, Vol. 4, Num. 1 (2005), pp. 3-16

[15] See O. Catts & I. Zurr, "Big Pigs Small Wings: On Genohype and Artistic Autonomy" in M. Cooper and A. Goffey (eds.), Culture Machine 7 – Biopolitics (2005).

[16] Cited in S. Squier, "Life and Death at Strangways" in P. Brodwin (ed.), Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, IN, 2000).

[17] See http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/disembodied/dis.html

[18] See New Harvest, http://www.new-harvest.org/

[19] http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/vl/vl.html