Stem Cell Researchers Can Now Combine Animal and Human Embryos In The US (sciencemag.org)

Slashdot reader sciencehabit quotes an article from Science magazine: The National Institutes of Health announced that the agency soon expects to lift a moratorium on funding for controversial experiments that add human stem cells to animal embryos, creating an organism that is part animal, part human. Instead, these so-called chimera studies will undergo an extra layer of ethical review but may ultimately be allowed to proceed.

Although scientists who support such research welcomed the move, some were left trying to parse exactly what the draft policy will mean. It is "a step in the right direction," says Sean Wu, a stem cell researcher at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who co-authored a letter to Science last year opposing the moratorium. But "we still don't know what the outcome will be case by case," he adds. However, some see the proposal as opening up research in some areas that had been potentially off-limits.
Experiments could include using animals to grow human organs for transplants, although according to the article, some scientists "worry that the experiments could produce, say, a supersmart mouse."

Comments

Extra-dimensional beings?

[Theovon]

Ah, so this is how we get all those mice that advance quantum physics for us.

Re:About time.

[physicsphairy]

That's not a great approach for discerning medical ethics. At the point your justification for medical experiments is, "in the long term there could be (as yet undemonstrated) major benefits" I don't think there is a single experiment you could not rationalize.