When mutton becomes "haraam"

[S.A.M.]

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.

He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep.

The process would involve extracting stem cells from the donor's bone marrow and injecting them into the peritoneum of a sheep's foetus. When the lamb is born, two months later, it would have a liver, heart, lungs and brain that are partly human and available for transplant.

"We would take a couple of ounces of bone marrow cells from the patient,' said Prof Zanjani, whose work is highlighted in a Channel 4 programme tomorrow.

"We would isolate the stem cells from them, inject them into the peritoneum of these animals and then these cells would get distributed throughout the metabolic system into the circulatory system of all the organs in the body. The two ounces of stem cell or bone marrow cell we get would provide enough stem cells to do about ten foetuses. So you don't just have one organ for transplant purposes, you have many available in case the first one fails."

At present 7,168 patients are waiting for an organ transplant in Britain alone, and two thirds of them are expected to die before an organ becomes available.

Scientists at King's College, London, and the North East Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle have now applied to the HFEA, the Government's fertility watchdog, for permission to start work on the chimeras.

But the development is likely to revive criticisms about scientists playing God, with the possibility of silent viruses, which are harmless in animals, being introduced into the human race.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=444436&in_page_id=1770

 

[Sputnik]

Weird , really weird ...........
I would expect a heavy immunoresponse against an organ containing 85 %
cells from an animal .........
If an organ is human , but not compatible on a few fractions of the recipient ,
you still get a heavy immunoresponse ...........:m:

Haraam allright , I guess ........

 

[S.A.M.]

Weird , really weird ...........
I would expect a heavy immunoresponse against an organ containing 85 %
cells from an animal .........
If an organ is human , but not compatible on a few fractions of the recipient ,
you still get a heavy immunoresponse ...........:m:

Haraam allright , I guess ........

I'm guessing this is just a first step.

 

[orcot]

faulty article all cells have the same DNA in a body(yeah I now that there are some cells without a nucleus and therefore DNA). That little chimera can't exist...
BTW i tought that a human and a animal was a lilim and 2 different animals a chimera? I'm never sure with names

 

[Hercules Rockefeller]

faulty article all cells have the same DNA in a body(yeah I now that there are some cells without a nucleus and therefore DNA). That little chimera can't exist...

No, your knowledge is faulty, not the article.

Scientists have been making chimeric animals for decades. These animals contain cells with different DNA. Mostly they have been chimeras of animals of the same species. For example, generating chimeric mice is an integral intermediate step in making "knockout" mouse lines that lack specific genes. It's somewhat more tricky to make chimeras of two different species of animal.

 

[orcot]

:bugeye: ooohkay I was under the inpression that you could change parts of the DNA so it contained parts of 2 different animals but that the DNA overall was still pretty much the same. Am I wrong?

 

[Hercules Rockefeller]

You are not wrong but you are confusing different concepts. What you are referring to in this instance is the genetic modification of an organism, such as the insertion into the genome of a piece of foreign DNA. Thus, every cell of the organism is carrying a piece of foreign DNA but, as you say, the overall DNA content of each cell is still essentially the same because the inserted foreign DNA represents only a tiny fraction of the total DNA of the genome.

But creating chimeric animals is a different concept. It is possible, and has been for some time, to create animals that are comprised of genetically different cells. In other words, animals that are comprised of cells that have different genomes, not merely small inserted pieces of DNA.

As an example, making chimeric mice is fairly routine. A blastocyst is an early stage embryo that exists as a hollow ball of ~100 cells. Embryonic stem cells from one mouse can be injected into a blastocyst of another. The injeted ES cells incorporate into the developing embryo. The resulting chimeric mouse is comprised of its own cells and cells derived from the original injected cells that are genetically distinct. There is no issue with rejection as a blastocyst has no immune system.

I have personal experience in making chimeras from my genetics research using zebrafish. The principle is the same – suck out some cells from one early stage embryo and inject them into another early stage embryo. The resulting larvae are chimeric. Prior to the transplantation I inject a fluorescent dye into the donor embryos, so I am able to identify the transplanted cells in the chimeric embryos by their fluorescence.

Apparently chimeric humans are a much more common occurrence than previously thought. I recall reading an article which suggested that during twin pregnancies one twin can “absorb” the other during early development. This happens early so it is generally never determined that there were ever twins in the first place. During the process of “absorption” cells from the absorbed twin become incorporated into the other twin. This results in the birth of a chimera, a person who is composed of cells of two different genetic origins (ie. two different people).

These are examples of chimeras of the same species. The article in the OP refers to an example of chimeras of two different species – sheep and human cells. This is somewhat trickier to achieve as the cells from different species display different cell surface receptors and may not be able to fully recognise each others’ secreted factors.

 

[Prince_James]

Revolting animalization of man.

Nihilistic and disgusting.

 

[S.A.M.]

An interesting example of a human chimera:

At the age of 52 when her children were full-grown, [Jane] and her children underwent genetic testing for a possible kidney transplant. Completely unexpectedly, two of her three children tested as genetically not hers. A mix-up of babies was ruled out, and she and her husband had not undergone in vitro fertilization, so it was absolute that her children were hers.

Jane, it turns out, is a human Chimera.

The most common form of human chimera is called a blood chimera. This happens when fraternal twins share some portion of the same placenta. Blood and blood-forming tissue is exchanged, and takes up residence in the bone marrow. Each twin is genetically separate except for their blood, which has two distinct sets of genes, and even two distinct blood types. Up to 8% of fraternal twins are blood chimeras, and as the incidence of fraternal twins in the general populace increases with the popularity of in vitro fertilization, the number of blood chimeras should rise proportionately.

What happened to Jane is a much rarer. Rather than a simple exchange of blood, she and her fraternal twin merged in utero, leaving only one fetus. The cells in her body are a mosaic of genes from both of the original embryos. The cheek cells from which the genetic testing was done were from one of those embryos, but at least some of the cells in her ovaries came from the other. Interestingly this genetic oddity gives her a better-than-usual chance of having a successful kidney donation, as her immune system does not reject as foreign either of two distinct tissue types. She would, however, be a poor candidate as a kidney donor were she in that position, due to the likelihood of two tissue types being present in her kidneys.

 

[orcot]

I've honestly never heard of it. It's good for organ donors who can't find a chinese volunteer I gues. I wouldn't call it nihilistic or disguisting and abouth animalization perhaps the problem is that where still animals and not omnipotent god's like we would want to be.
It's interesting and creepy like most things that involve the biology of men.