Spontaneous scrotal detonation is suspected in cult disappearances, they say.
Why are British scientists creating a human-pig hybrid?
When the BritisÂh government's organization for science oversight approved a request to create human-pig hybrids in December 2007, there was uproar in the country. The extent of the debate, both bioethical and scientific, seemed to reflect the approval of a brand-new science. Chimeras, however, aren't new. They're just not that well publicized, because previous research in combining species has been carried out primarily in countries that don't require public disclosure of research-science requests, like the United StÂates and China.
Researchers at Shanghai Second University have combined humans and rabbits [source: Telegraph]. Mayo Clinic scientists in Minnesota have already created pigs that have human blood, and a Stanford researcher developed mice whose brains are 1 percent human, with the ultimate goal of creating mice with entirely human brains [source: National Geographic]. It's not actually new in Britain, either: Human-cow embryos have been growing in London for quite some time.
You may even know a chimera, yourself. Technically, transplant patients who've received heart valves from a pig are chimeras. Along those lines, some of the chimera research to date has focused on how to create animal organs that are partly human so the human body has a better chance of accepting that kind of transplant. Some of it focuses on creating an egg to aid in human fertility research, since human eggs are hard to come by and are very expensive. Other research, though, including the new research at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, has different, albeit related, goals.
Most of us are familiar with how a clone comes to be. Scientists take an egg from, say, a sheep, and remove the nucleus that contains most of the genetic material. What's left is basically an egg waiting to be filled with new genetic instructions – a new yolk, if you will. They then remove the nucleus from another sheep egg and insert it into the first one. That new egg gets implanted into a surrogate sheep that carries and delivers a clone of the animal whose nucleus filled the egg.
Creating a chimera is mostly the same. The only big difference is the source of the transplanted nucleus. In the case of a human-pig hybrid, the egg comes from a pig, and the nucleus comes from a human.
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https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/human-pig-hybrid.htm