It's time to make human-chimp hybrids

These days, however, a humanzee or chimphuman is not beyond imagining. There have been many advances in biomedical research that not only emphasize the continuity between human beings and other animals, but that do so explicitly in the interest of human betterment. Research efforts are currently underway seeking to produce organs (kidneys, livers, etc.) that develop within an animal’s body—pigs are the preferred target species—and whose genetic fingerprints are sufficiently close to the Homo sapiens counterpart to be accepted by a human recipient’s immune system, while also able to function in lieu of the recipient’s damaged organ. A human skin cell, for example, can be biochemically induced to become a “pluripotent stem cell,” capable of differentiating into any human tissue type. If, say, a replacement liver is desired, these stem cells can be introduced into a pig embryo after first using CRISPR to inactivate the embryo’s liver-producing genes. If all goes well, the resulting pig-human chimera will have the body of a pig, but containing an essentially human liver, which would then be available for transplantation into a person whose liver is failing.

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