{"id":3049339,"date":"2024-01-05T10:00:41","date_gmt":"2024-01-05T15:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/platoaistream.com\/plato-data\/pigs-with-human-brain-cells-and-biological-chips-how-lab-grown-hybrid-life-forms-are-bamboozling-scientific-ethics\/"},"modified":"2024-01-05T10:00:41","modified_gmt":"2024-01-05T15:00:41","slug":"pigs-with-human-brain-cells-and-biological-chips-how-lab-grown-hybrid-life-forms-are-bamboozling-scientific-ethics","status":"publish","type":"station","link":"https:\/\/platoaistream.com\/plato-data\/pigs-with-human-brain-cells-and-biological-chips-how-lab-grown-hybrid-life-forms-are-bamboozling-scientific-ethics\/","title":{"rendered":"Pigs With Human Brain Cells and Biological Chips: How Lab-Grown Hybrid Life Forms Are Bamboozling Scientific\u00a0Ethics"},"content":{"rendered":"
In September, scientists at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health announced<\/a> they had successfully grown \u201chumanized\u201d kidneys inside pig embryos.<\/p>\n The scientists genetically altered the embryos to remove their ability to grow a kidney, then injected them with human stem cells. The embryos were then implanted into a sow and allowed to develop for up to 28 days.<\/p>\n The resulting embryos were made up mostly of pig cells (although some human cells were found throughout their bodies, including in the brain). However, the embryonic kidneys were largely human.<\/p>\n This breakthrough suggests it may soon be possible to generate human organs inside part-human \u201cchimeric\u201d animals. Such animals could be used for medical research or to grow organs for transplant, which could save many human lives.<\/p>\n But the research is ethically fraught. We might want to do things to these creatures we would never do to a human, like kill them for body parts. The problem is, these chimeric pigs aren\u2019t just<\/em> pigs\u2014they are also partly human.<\/p>\n If a human\u2013pig chimera were brought to term, should we treat it like a pig, like a human, or like something else altogether?<\/p>\n Maybe this question seems too easy. But what about the idea<\/a> of creating monkeys with humanized brains<\/a>?<\/p>\n Other areas of stem cell science raise similarly difficult questions.<\/p>\n In June, scientists created \u201csynthetic embryos<\/a>\u201d\u2014lab-grown embryo models<\/a> that closely resemble normal human embryos. Despite the similarities, they fell outside the scope of legal definitions of a human embryo in the United Kingdom (where the study took place).<\/p>\n Like human\u2013pig chimeras, synthetic embryos straddle two distinct categories: in this case, stem cell model and human embryo. It is not obvious how they should be treated.<\/p>\n In the past decade, we have also seen the development of increasingly sophisticated human cerebral organoids<\/a> (or \u201clab-grown mini-brains<\/a>\u201d).<\/p>\n Unlike synthetic embryos, cerebral organoids<\/a> don\u2019t mimic the development of a whole person. But they do mimic the development of the part that stores our memories, thinks our thoughts, and makes conscious experience possible.<\/p>\nChimeras Are Only One Challenge Among Many<\/h2>\n