The NIH originally placed a moratorium on funding such research in September 2015, citing potential ethical concerns with the research.
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The National Institutes of Health has unveiled a new policy to permit scientists to get federal money to make the embryos, known as chimeras, under certain carefully monitored conditions. The Bible Study them to learn many new things that you could use to prevent and treat human diseases like Alzheimer’s disease Parkinson’s diabetes.
The blanket ban led to an uproar among pro-chimera scientists hoping to use the hybrid animals as models for studying human disease and to investigate whether they could be used to grow human organs. For example, scientists could unintentionally create animals with human consciousness or inadvertently cause a human embryo to grow inside other species.
“I am confident that these proposed changes will enable the NIH research community to move this promising area of science forward in a responsible manner,”said Carrie D. Wolinetz, the associate director for science policy at NIH”.
Critics argue that scientists could accidentally create animals with partly human brains, and sentience.
A new government committee will also be created to review requests for funding for chimaera-related experiments, particularly those involving brain modification.
It’s unlikely that these guidelines would be applied to somebody trying to creating a living cross between a human and an animal for some mad science objective.
Scientists in the US could soon be allowed to create part-human, part-animal embryos in the laboratory, now that a nation-wide moratorium on chimera research is under official review. For instance, it still bans inter-species embryos with nonhuman primates like monkeys and chimps since they are close relatives to humans.
“Let´s say that we have pigs with human brains and they are wondering why we are doing experiments on them”, said Stuart Newman, a researcher at New York Medical College. “It’s important to our mission to improve human health”, Wolinetz told NPR.
But the difference between animals with some human DNA and animals with entire human organs is enough to raise a lot of ethical questions.
“If we want to do research on schizophrenia and Alzheimer´s and depression, we can´t readily do research on brain cells of humans with these diseases because we can´t open up the brains of people while they are alive”, said Robert Klitzman, director of Columbia University´s Master´s of bioethics program. “It’s very, very welcome news that NIH will consider funding this type of research”, says Pablo Ross, a developmental biologist at the University of California, Davis, trying to grow human organs in farm animals. To advance regenerative medicine, it is common practice to validate the potency of pluripotent human cells – which can become any tissue in the body – through introducing them into rodents.
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In the blog post, Wolinetz said the NIH was creating a steering committee that would advise NIH officials on funding decisions regarding early embryonic human-animal chimeras.
