For several years the world science was shaken by a gigantic scandal - scientists managed to cross a man and a cow, a man and a rabbit, a man and a mouse … That is, to obtain chimeras - living beings that do not exist in nature, from which scarce embryonic stem cells could be obtained. But they failed to deceive God
The idea to create a "monster", as clerical publications and conservative politicians shouted, did not come to scientists from a good life. Fertilized embryos are needed to produce embryonic stem cells that promise to be a breakthrough in new medicine. Used "surplus" embryos from artificial insemination - they are always harvested more than required. But this, firstly, is expensive, and secondly, it is also scandalous - believers consider the use of the embryo to be the murder of a person.
Then they took the eggs of a cow, mouse or rabbit, took out the nuclei from them and instead inserted the nuclei of ordinary human cells - the skin and mucous membrane of the mouth of the scientists themselves. The result is chimeras - semi-animals, semi-humans in the form of a fertilized ovum-zygote. The experiment was repeated in several laboratories. Now it turns out that it was in vain.
Chimeric embryos were found to be unsuitable for obtaining viable stem cells, writes the journal Cloning and Stem Cell. One company studied the properties of chimeric embryos obtained from the eggs of cows, rabbits and mice. They were similar to humans in shape and cell division rate, and their nuclei did indeed contain human DNA. However, the overwhelming majority of genes that regulate the development of embryonic cells in the early stages simply did not work for them. Which makes their use in scientific and medical research meaningless.
Why the chimeras did not live up to the hopes of scientists remains to be seen. Either the cytoplasm of animal oocytes is very different from the contents of humans … Or the extra-nuclear genetic material of mitochondria, the special organs of the cell that produce the energy it needs, has not yet been fully studied … Or it is just that such risky experiments with nature bear the seal “forbidden” … Open this the secret is no less interesting than getting a positive result. Well, let's wait and find out.