Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Of men and mice
As noted in the story, there is a 'Yuck' factor that may have been inadvertently crossed. A lump of cells jammed into a mouse's brain ... good thing this is in San Francisco where Christianity has been outlawed. The Eco-Nuts (anti GM folks) are there in force though.
Technorati Tags: Science | Politics | Religion
- SAN FRANCISCO - Add another creation to the strange scientific menagerie where animal species are being mixed together in ever more exotic combinations.
Scientists announced yesterday that they had created mice with small amounts of human brain cells in an effort to make realistic models of neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease.
Led by Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in San Diego, the researchers created the mice by injecting about 100,000 human embryonic stem cells per mouse into the brains of 14-day-old rodent fetuses.
Those mice were each born with about 0.1 percent of human cells in each of their heads, a trace amount that does not remotely come close to "humanizing" the rodents.
"This illustrates that injecting human stem cells into mouse brains doesn't restructure the brain," Gage said.
Still, the work adds to the growing ethical concerns of mixing human and animal cells when it comes to stem-cell and cloning research.
"The worry is if you humanize them too much you cross certain boundaries," said David Magnus, director of the Stanford Medical Center for Biomedical Ethics. "But I don't think this research comes even close to that."
<...>
Researchers are nevertheless beginning to bump up against what bioethicists call the "yuck factor."
Three top cloning researchers, for instance, have applied for a patent that contemplates fusing a complete set of human DNA into animal eggs to manufacture human embryonic stem cells.
One of the patent applicants, Jose Cibelli, first attempted such an experiment in 1998 when he fused cells from his cheek into cow eggs. [ed. Cow eggs? Chicken-Cow hybrid ... I LIKE it! ;)]
"The idea is to hijack the machinery of the egg," said Cibelli, whose current work at Michigan State University does not involve human material because that would violate state law.
Technorati Tags: Science | Politics | Religion
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