{"id":123817,"date":"2021-06-14T21:22:34","date_gmt":"2021-06-15T04:22:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/scientists-grew-human-cells-in-monkey-embryos-and-yes-its-an-ethical-minefield"},"modified":"2021-06-14T21:22:34","modified_gmt":"2021-06-15T04:22:34","slug":"scientists-grew-human-cells-in-monkey-embryos-and-yes-its-an-ethical-minefield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/scientists-grew-human-cells-in-monkey-embryos-and-yes-its-an-ethical-minefield","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Grew Human Cells in Monkey Embryos, and Yes, Its an Ethical Minefield"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-grew-human-cells-in-monkey-embryos-and-yes-its-an-ethical-minefield3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The way the team made the human\u2013<i>monkey<\/i> embryo is similar to previous attempts at half-human chimeras.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s how it goes. They used de-programmed, or \u201creverted,\u201d human stem cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These cells often start from skin cells, and are chemically treated to revert to the stem cell stage, gaining back the superpower to grow into almost any type of cell: heart, lung, brain\u2026you get the idea. The next step is preparing the <i>monkey<\/i> component, a fertilized and healthy <i>monkey<\/i> egg that develops for six days in a Petri dish. By this point, the embryo is ready for implantation into the uterus, which kicks off the whole development process.<\/p>\n<p>This is where the chimera jab comes in. Using a tiny needle, the team injected each embryo with 25 human cells, and babied them for another day. \u201cUntil recently the experiment would have ended there,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/abs\/pii\/S0092867421003755\">wrote<\/a> Drs. Hank Greely and Nita Farahany, two prominent bioethicists who wrote an accompanying expert take, but were not involved in the study.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The way the team made the human\u2013monkey embryo is similar to previous attempts at half-human chimeras. Here\u2019s how it goes. They used de-programmed, or \u201creverted,\u201d human stem cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These cells often start from skin cells, and are chemically treated to revert to the stem cell stage, gaining back the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,11,19,30,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry","category-ethics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123817\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}