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March 25, 2007

Can You Say Soylent Green?

Scientists for the past four years have been busy at work developing sheep that will grow human organs for transplant. Under the direction of Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada in Reno, the first animal-human chimeras are now a reality. Fully 15% of the cells in the sheep's bodies are human and its organs are half human. I don't know about you, but this development makes my skin crawl

I can certainly understand the motivation. Dr. Zanjani believes that by using a particular human's own stem cells he will in the not-too-distant future be able to grow a perfectly matched human organ for them inside a sheep – a life-saving miracle for thousands of people a year. No more waiting on a transplant list for an organ donor. Your wait will be the amount of time it takes to transplant stem cells from your bone marrow into a sheep fetus, then wait for it to be born. By the time it is two months old, its liver, heart, and lungs will be ready to transplant. But here is the really icky part for me: so will its brain.

Can you imagine life as a semi-human brain stuck inside a lamb's body? It's just wrong. And not only will you have this very weird situation for a couple of months of life, but multiple animals would be prepared for each recipient in this way to ensure back-up organs in the event that one fails. What would happen to the remaining partially human brains trapped in a lamb's body? Call me paranoid, but I'm haunted by the possibility that we could end up sending the semi-human lambs to the slaughterhouse for human consumption.

Posted by Becky at March 25, 2007 06:15 PM