There’s an ethical storm brewing over half-human half-monkey embryos
The mere phrase ‘human-monkey chimera embryo’ sounds like a bioethicist’s worst nightmare — or, perhaps, a science-fiction writer’s fantasy.
But the concept of a half-human, half-monkey hybrid is no longer a dream.
Scientists, led by Professor Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in the US, have made it a reality by creating the world’s first human-monkey chimera embryos in China.
They achieved this by injecting 25 human stem cells each into 132 long-tailed macaque embryos, six days after fertilisation, according to their recent publication in Cell.
