We’ve Created Human-Pig Chimeras–But We Haven’t Weighed the Ethics

January 26, 2017

(STAT News) – I’m worried about a new paper in the journal Cell that details the creation of a human-pig chimera. As a neuroscientist, I appreciate groundbreaking research at a purely scientific level and understand the hard work that goes into advances like this. But I also believe that science should be guided by ethics, and this work seems to be jumping ahead of ethical considerations. In the new work, led by investigators at the Salk Institute, researchers injected days-old pig embryos with human pluripotent stem cells. By the time the fetal pigs were aborted, they had begun to grow partly human organs.