Japan approves first human-animal embryo experiments
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Re: Japan approves first human-animal embryo experiments
#2grow human organs inside rats and? how does that work? i don't understand. meanwhile we are entering the sixt mass extinction event caused by a massive climate change. what good is this technology when you have failing crops, extreme weather, no electricity and mass immigration at your doorstep?
Re: Japan approves first human-animal embryo experiments
#3grow human organs inside rats and? how does that work? i don't understand. meanwhile we are entering the sixt mass extinction event caused by a massive climate change. what good is this technology when you have failing crops, extreme weather, no electricity and mass immigration at your doorstep?
it's fairly complicated but basically that's the magic of induced pluripotent stem cells. It's possible to turn human cells into cells that are prepared to become a specific organ, and then place them in an environment in which they will grow to that organ. This is because most of the necessary commands to differentiate and multiply cells into an organ are encoded in the genome and cellular state.
I think the wikipedia page helps understand this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell although the part where you can actually make a rat/human hybrid is still undefined science.
Re: Japan approves first human-animal embryo experiments
#4grow human organs inside rats and? how does that work? i don't understand. meanwhile we are entering the sixt mass extinction event caused by a massive climate change. what good is this technology when you have failing crops, extreme weather, no electricity and mass immigration at your doorstep?
it's fairly complicated but basically that's the magic of induced pluripotent stem cells. It's possible to turn human cells into cells that are prepared to become a specific organ, and then place them in an environment in which they will grow to that organ. This is because most of the necessary commands to differentiate and multiply cells into an organ are encoded in the genome and cellular state. I think the wikiped…
[This is because most of the necessary commands to differentiate and multiply cells into an organ are encoded in the genome and cellular state.]
Re: Japan approves first human-animal embryo experiments
#5grow human organs inside rats and? how does that work? i don't understand. meanwhile we are entering the sixt mass extinction event caused by a massive climate change. what good is this technology when you have failing crops, extreme weather, no electricity and mass immigration at your doorstep?
Presumably, the eventual goal is to grow full-sized organs inside some larger animal. Then the organ can be harvested and transplanted to a human who needs it. Per my understanding, medicine does a lot of work with rats because they're cheap and easy to work with, so any new technology of this type would be tried on rats first.
By the way, my neutral explanation above doesn't mean that I approve of doing such things. Honestly, I'm quite torn about the issue.
Re: Japan approves first human-animal embryo experiments
#6Yeah America has all the moral debates about genetics and experiments with embryos. But the bottom line is other countries are going to move forward no matter what America does.
Re: Japan approves first human-animal embryo experiments
#7[In 2017, Nakauchi and his colleagues reported the injection of mouse iPS cells into the embryo of a rat that was unable to produce a pancreas. The rat formed a pancreas made entirely of mouse cells. Nakauchi and his team transplanted that pancreas back into a mouse that had been engineered to have diabetes, The rat-produced organ was able to control blood sugar levels, effectively curing the mouse of diabetes1.]
WOW :O
Re: Japan approves first human-animal embryo experiments
#8[deleted]
Re: Japan approves first human-animal embryo experiments
#9grow human organs inside rats and? how does that work? i don't understand. meanwhile we are entering the sixt mass extinction event caused by a massive climate change. what good is this technology when you have failing crops, extreme weather, no electricity and mass immigration at your doorstep?
Presumably, the eventual goal is to grow full-sized organs inside some larger animal. Then the organ can be harvested and transplanted to a human who needs it. Per my understanding, medicine does a lot of work with rats because they're cheap and easy to work with, so any new technology of this type would be tried on rats first. By the way, my neutral explanation above doesn't mean that I approve of doing such things.…
Hopefully the use of animals for tissue incubation and harvesting is a bridge to a future when animals are no longer required for human tissue synthesis.
Artificial womb experiments are going well [1], as well as tissue synthesis for cultured meat (which is just animal muscle), so...maybe?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/15421734/artificial-womb-...
Re: Japan approves first human-animal embryo experiments
#10Yes, it's pretty crazy how well this already works.
A toast to the manpig that shall grow my future replacement liver!