Scientists Create World's First Pig-Monkey Chimera In China

Scientists in China created the first pig monkey chimeras. Although the creatures looked just like regular piglets, they actually had monkey DNA.

Pig-Monkey Chimera

In a new study, researchers from China reported the successful creation of pig-monkey chimeras for the first time. The idea, according to researchers, is to eventually move on to growing human organs in animals for transplant procedures. However, the team used monkey cells because due to possible ethical issues that come along with human-animal chimeras.

In order to create the pig-monkey chimeras, the researchers grew cynomolgus monkey cells in laboratory dishes and altered the DNA to make the cells grow bright green so that they would be able to track them in the piglet embryos.

For the study, they injected monkey DNA to 4,000 pig embryos that were then implanted into sows. A total of 10 piglets were born from the embryos, but only two had both pig and monkey cells throughout multiple organs such as the lungs, heart, skin, liver, and spleen.

Each organ contained between one in 1,000 to one in 10,000 monkey cells, meaning that the creatures were 99 percent pig. Although it does not seem like much, it actually outnumbers the highest number of human cells in human-animal chimera, which is one human cell in every 100,000 pig cells.

That said, the two pig-monkey chimeras, as well as the eight other piglets, died of “unclear” reasons shortly after birth. According to the researchers, it is possible that the deaths are a result of the IVF rather than the monkey DNA since IVF has proven to be inconsistent in pigs.

The results are published in the journal Protein & Cell.

Chimera

In Greek Mythology, a chimera is a creature with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a serpent. In the modern scientific world, chimeras are animals that also have human cells or hybrid animals with DNA from two different animals. Although this sounds rather like science fiction or perhaps strange experiments, they have actually become rather commonplace in today ’s laboratories for the purpose of understanding human diseases.

For instance, other researchers have previously created human-animal hybrid embryos that were allowed to develop for just a short time for fears that the creature resulting in the hybrid would have human consciousness.

While there are no malicious purposes for such experiments, particularly since they are being made specifically for biomedical research, combining the DNA of two different creatures -- even human and animal DNA -- remains to be a troubling thought for many.