Japan to Allow Human-Nonhuman Mixed Cloning

Sara Chan writes: "Japan has decided to allow combined human-animal embryos to be produced through cloning, which could result in mixed-species creatures. The intended purpose is to permit transplant organs to be produced in specially-bred animals. The original story is in a Japanese newspaper, but you can get an English summary here."

Comments

My first reaction

[imrdkl]

We got too many trolls already.

Does this mean..

[witz]

That soon we'll be seeing Spiderman, Wolverine and The Thing roaming the streets?
This just smells bad.

It has to be said...

[Johnso]

Bart: "How would I go about creating a half-man, half-monkey-type creature?" Ms. Krabapple: "I'm sorry, that would be playing God..." Bart: "God schmod. I want my monkey man!"

Re:It has to be said...

[mmaddox]

Two words:
vagina, sheep.

Hellooooooooo, Dolly!

They Need to

[hooded1]

How else are they gunna make all that anime into live cinema. You need animal-human hybrids.

Gigantic moral issues

[PoiBoy]

Whether this is scientifically feasible is a trivial question compared to the ethics of such an endeavor. If one believes that humans are different from animals in that we contain a spirit and an awareness of God, then should a cross between a human and an animal be considered an animal or a spiritual being? Moreover, as an advanced society, do we really wish to combine our gene pool with that of an animal?

Is this a step forward for mankind, or a step backward?

Re:Gigantic moral issues

[Chasuk]

If one believes that humans are different from animals in that we contain a spirit and an awareness of God,

Religious belief doesn't deserve a special category, and should not be confused with ethics. I can think of several ethical objections to this type of research, and none of them involve a belief in God(s) or ensoulment.

Moreover, as an advanced society, do we really wish to combine our gene pool with that of an animal?

As we are animals, this question could almost be considered facetious, but I doubt that was your intent. The question should perhaps be:

As a society, advanced or otherwise, should we engage in research which mixes human and non-human gene pools?

My ethics ascribe nothing special to the state of being human (or nothing which would be pertinent to this debate), so the question, for me, becomes:

Should we engage in research which involves the mixing of interspecies gene pools?

Yes, we should, or at least we should not restrict ourselves from such research without solid, logical reasons. This reasons may also be ethical reasons, as logic and ethics are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Re:Gigantic moral issues

[Bi()hazard]

Consider for a moment that the chimpanzee shares more than 99% of its DNA with humans. Your first reaction may be, "Phew, I suppose adding human DNA to animal embryos won't have such a drastic effect overall." However, that would be missing the point: miniscule changes in DNA are capable of creating drastic and unpredictable mutations in the resulting organism. Having interned in a biotech lab, I can tell you scientists are well aware of this. Current bioengineered organisms are created using the most conservative methods available. For example, the GE corn is modified only with a single well known and fully documented gene at a time. That's why we don't have true designer foods yet-scientists know that they can only control simple processes they've observed occurring naturally. Anything more would be completely unpredictable-a drastically mutated corn could even be poisonous, due to extensions of the same biological processes they prize as natural pesticides now.

We can only hope the scientists in Japan are as cautious. Adding carefully selected human genes to replace closely related animal counterparts could result in a source of transplantable organs, and a huge supply of failed test subjects. However, reckless experimentation could create monsters. We wouldn't see catgirls, we'd see the sort of deformed, unrecognizable things I'm sure a few of the trolls are going to link to. (Don't worry, I'm going to spare you the sources for all of these) A pig with one and a half heads, a calf with organs on the outside of its body, and retarded mice with skulls too thin to protect their brains from being damaged by wind have all been documented in nature, but they are extrememely rare and immediately culled by natural selection. A laboratory environment makes these disasters very likely, and allows for propagation of their genetic lines.

Even if we put aside the moral implications of creating and sustaining these creatures, there are practical dangers. Such organisms would likely possess immune systems too weak to defend against the sort of pathogens normal organisms never notice. Look at what happens to late stage AIDS patients-they often contract rare diseases doctors have never seen before. They fall prey to bacteria assumed to be harmless, or fungal infections that have never been observed growing in living things before. These diseases could use a large supply of debilitated mutants as incubators to develop until natural selection produces strains capable of surviving in healthy organisms. We could see the emergence of a virus as unexpected and deadly as ebola. This is only one of the dangers posed by genetic experimentation. However, the potential benefits are too good to resist. There is no choice but to experiment, and we can only hope the experiments are done responsibly.

Re:Gigantic moral issues

[aozilla]

Whether this is scientifically feasible is a trivial question compared to the ethics of such an endeavor. If one believes that humans are different from animals in that we contain a spirit and an awareness of God, then should a cross between a human and an animal be considered an animal or a spiritual being?

Sounds like a good way to find out. Create one and ask it.

Differences in American and Japanese cultures

[bigdreamer]

I find it fascinating that in America, people freak out when they hear about human cells being cloned. But in Japan, they're discussing mixing animal cells with human cells. I wonder how Americans would react to such a combination? I don't think the Religious Right would handle this issue very well.

Re:Differences in American and Japanese cultures

[Knunov]

Which is exactly why we should get our legislature off its stupid ass and pound some sense into them. If we don't do it, someone else will, and profit greatly from it. We should be leading the way in genetic engineering technology, not following.

The next worldwide industrial boom will be Bioengineering. If people are willing to pay $1000 for a CPU upgrade, imagine what they would pay for blue eyes. Or broad shoulders. Or a high IQ. Or thick hair that will never fall out. Or straight teeth. The list goes on and on.

We need to be positioned well in this industry.

Knunov

Re:Differences in American and Japanese cultures

[Velox_SwiftFox]

To fix a defect is one thing, but to create a race of super-humans is another.

So those who make up the left hand edge of the IQ spectrum, or are below average in strength, and maybe other arbitrary categories should live with their disadvantages - but we raise the bar for "normal" 20/20 eyesight, immunity against diseases, and other categories?

What do you think happens when we eliminate those on the low side of the average, we all become above average?

Besides, who died and made you God?

Wow, that's a hell of a step.

[autopr0n]

I find this disturbing. And I'm one of the people who can't understand at all why people are bothered by the idea of 'regular' cloning; I mean it really makes no sense to me. But allowing chimeras to be created? That's just something I never thought anyone would do.

Or am I misunderstanding what's actually going on. Are they simply doing things like creating human hearts in monkeys and the like? As with the tobacco plants we rigged up to create hemoglobin or insulin or whatever? I don't really see a problem with that, I guess.

I do see that they plan to ban 'regular' cloning, so I guess they don't want the whole 'mad scientist' thing going on. If it could really be used to ultimately cure sick people and make people more healthy then really (imo) it would be unethical to disallow it.

Cat Girls

[Apreche]

My roomate has a thing for cat-girls and he's pretty excited right now. I however don't like this idea one bit. I mean most wild animals can kick a human's ass. Imagine a lion/man or and elephant/man. Smart and powerful. They'll take over. Just like exo squad, if you've ever seen it.

Aren't they doing this already?

[shanek]

IANAGeneticist, but my understanding is that insulin for diabetics is produced by injecting human genes into e. coli bacteria. So, aren't we already making human-nonhuman (in this case, bacteria) hybrids?

Re:Aren't they doing this already?

[dondelelcaro]

Yes. Typically it's not done with human genes, as it's easier to get non-human cells and non-human genes, but alot of experiments involve rescueing null mutants (where a protein of importance has been disabled in the mutant) with exogenous or xenobiotic protein or DNA. This is typically used as a demonstration of the ability of a specific model to be used as an abstraction of the equivalent human system (or higher organism). [I haven't done this work in my lab, as we don't deal with whole cells, but there are researchers around me who have...]

In the near future, the most likely thing that is going to happen is the cloning of pigs with exact copies of human immunospecific proteins for the human who needs an organ transplant. Then the donor animal will have an exact match immunologically with the human patient, and the human patient will not have to be subjected to an arduous immunosuppressent regimin. So you'll have a chimeric pig expressing the patient's immunological markers, and won't have to wait for a compatible human donor to die or sign consent forms.

Beyond that is mere conjecture, but I don't expect we'll be seeing anything resembling the mythical chimeras of olde, as a work like that would involve a gargantuan effort and (in my mind at least) would have little to no scientific validity and usefullness.

Human to human transplants are taboo in Japan.

[alphaseven]

It doesn't surprise me that Japan would be so eager to use animals to supply organs, organ transplants from humans was illegal until 1997.

Japan's first transplant procedure in 1968 resulted with the doctor being charged with murder because it wasn't clear if the donor was brain dead.

Aparently the taboo has something to do with Japan's Shinto and Buddhist beliefs. Here's a link: Japan Legalized Organ Transplants from Brain-dead.

Bad reporting

[cosmicaug]

Superficial reading of the Ananova article would give one the impression that they are talking about a partly human chimera (it is hard to read "combined human-animal embryos" any other way); which would be a horribly unethical monstrosity.

What they're undoubtedly talking about (though I can't verify it since I can't read Japanese) are transgenic animals which express human proteins which is nothing new and posses no real ethical challenges (other than those involving the safety issues of xenotransplantation such as the real posibility for introducing various pathogens into the human population).

Re:Terrible idea

[Zeinfeld]

A great example of this might be your mentioning Three Mile Island. You may not be aware of this, but Three Mile Island was not a disaster.

I have a PhD in Nuclear physics and I am a chartered engineer.

Three mile island came within seconds of a melt down. It demonstrates conclusively that the nuclear industry was nowhere near as safe as it had claimed. I don't accept the spin from the PR flaks of the nuclear industry that we have to trust them until they kill 5,000 people for real.

If the dice had rolled only slightly differently, the operators at Cherobyl might have succeeded in shutting down the reactor, had the three mile island operators not been lucky the reactor might have gone. The design flaw at Chernobyl was one that could not have been predicted with the design tools available in the USSR or the US when the plants were built. It was an area of positive feedback in the control regime that could only be detected using 3d modelling. That did not become possible until the introduction of the first CRAY series - and even then it took quite a long time for the simulation software to appear.

Moreover, the placement of any potentially hazardous industrial complex on three mile island should never have been allowed, let alone a nuclear plant. The bridges to the island simply cannot support an evacuation in an acceptable time. Building a nuclear plant that close to manhattan was gross negligence.

I used the term 'intrinsicaly safe' in a technical sense, no light water design is intrinsically safe, there is a critical mass that is damped down to prevent runnaway. If the safety systems fail and do not fail safe as planned you get a heck of a bang.

The Canadian CANDU heavy water system is intrinsically safe. It employs heavy water as the moderator, if there is a failure of the pressure vessel etc, etc the glass containers shatter and the moderator drains away shutting down the reaction. In pebble bed each fuel element is encapsulated in a moderator shell, again no critical mass, no chance of a big bang.

Do not assume that because there are some ignorant critics of nuclear power that all critics are ignorant. If the nuclear industry had not told so many blatant and deliberate lies in the 60s and 70s there might have been fewer ignorant critics today.

Jim Cramer (The Street.com) has a rule - financial irregularities means sell. Basically when ypou have been lied to by the management of a company it is time to take the exit door (e.g. Enron). In the UK the Thatcher govt. discovered during their privatization of the electricity industry that far from being low cost, the nuclear stations were barely economic on an operating basis - there was no possibility of paying of the original capital costs or eventual decommissioning costs. As a result a government that started ideologically committed to nuclear power discovered that the books had been cooked and they could not sell the plants to anyone at any price.

Further, the irrational fear of nuclear-anything means that most Americans miss out on some important technologies: for example, all of the E coli outbreaks of the last decade could have been prevented through irradiation.

Irradiation is banned for good reason. If you irradiate food you kill off the bugs but not the toxins they create. If technology allows food that is unfit for human consumption to be passed of as fresh you can be 100% sure that it will happen in the US.

Re:won't fly in the USA

[Yorrike]

All I can say is, FINALLY!

A country has the guts (and yes, I'm not surprised it's Japan), to go about ignoring the stupid religious morals set by the US in regard to cloning animals/humans with the specific end of using them for organ harvesting.

I'm one step closer to being able to have a genetically perfect pancreas transplant, which means I'm a step closer to being able cease these stupid insulin injections 4-8 times a day.

Please don't mix cells and animals!

[Exmet Paff Daxx]

Human cloning? Far from being the "Attack of the Clones", nothing is more misunderstood than medicinal human cloning. Please, don't confuse the goals of The Human Cloning Foundation, the federation of misanthropes bent on finding a country willing to host their young Frankenstein adventures, with Medicinal Human Cloning.

The idea behind Medicinal Human Cloning (MHC) is to clone human cells at the cellular level, before cell differentiation. Cell differentiation occurs 2 weeks into the life of an embryo, when all the cells in the embryo stop being homogenous and, all at once, establish their own identities. Some become hand cells, some feet cells, some brain cells, some blood cells. This "magic" event is the point at which human life begins. MHC is the process of cloning human cells before this event.

The point of being able to harvest unlimited quantities of undifferentiated human cells is that these cells can become any cell in the body; they are "undecided", yet genetically matched to the recipient. The applications here are as numerous as you can imagine: tissue replacement, skin replacement for burn victims, manufactured organs custom-matched to the recipient. This is the promise we are debating; the lives of millions who could be saved by this procedure, from burn victims to heart attack victims.

This advance promises to revolutionize medicine. Not just technically, but from a societal perspective as well. If we understand anything about MHC, it is that it will be prohibitively expensive to apply to an entire population. An order of magnitude costlier than even heart transplantation, we are dealing with sums of millions of dollars per regenerated organ. And unlike transplantation, this technique will be able to prolong the life of anyone, indefinitely. As a society, we will soon be in the position of deciding the lifespan(s) of each of our citizens. Not because we control death; not euthenasia, but because we control life.

We've already seen this paradigm emerge with the "list" for heart transplants. The pathetic attempt at a "meritocracy" for deciding who receives a new heart has been a total failure, as evidenced by the case of David Crosby. The system is weighted in favor of the rich, against the poor. Will this paradigm dominate the field of Medicinal Human Cloning? Will only the rich live forever? Will money become the force of life? Not if we can help it. We will need to act decisively as events are set in motion.

We must establish a true meritocracy for the Immortality Revolution ushered in by advances in Medicinal Human Cloning. Like the Slashdot Moderation system, we could create a system of random "Moderators", if you will, who are picked secretly and randomly and given the ability to tag their fellow citizens as deserving or undeserving of the scarce asset of Organ Regeneration, financed by the state. You could rate your neighbor (-1 Stupid) for abusing his spouse, or your coworker (+1 Insightful) for fixing your printer connection. Those with the highest scores would receive the greatest medical benefit: Immortality.

Imagine a world where we never lost an Einstein, never killed a Bohr. Where great leaders like George Bush could advise us forever; where people like Noam Chomsky were but a temporary nuisance. This is the promise of cloning: not reproducing the husks of people but giving the gift of life to the greatest among us.

We must act swiftly when the time comes.

The most dangerous animal

[hey!]

I don't know. This idea that men are the wimps of the animal world is a bit overdone, I think. Pre-human North America was chock full of huge critters that would make the Serengeti look like a suburban park. Then people got here and wiped 'em all out in a geologic wink of an eye. Let's face it -- even armed with weapons made from sticks and flint chips man is the most dangerous animal on Earth.

Of course it's the giant brain, opposble thumb and social cooperation that makes man really formidable, but it's hard to imagine a chimera that takes full advantage of human and, say lion capabilities. Can you have the lion's formidable claws and still keep dexterity? Or its powerful killing jaws and a mouth capable of articulating language?

Even some characteristics that at first seem like liabilities aren't. Our lack fur, scales, and general light build for example. On one hand, it leaves us relatively defenseless. On the other hand, it makes us offensively more formidable. A well trained runner can chase most game animals until they collapse of heat prostration.