Can you crossbreed a human and a monkey

The idea behind the research is to determine whether or not monkey's could eventually be able to grow human organs for transplants. According to the team of scientists, thousands of people die every year waiting for such transplants. In recent years, some scientists have been experimenting with injecting human stem cells into sheep and pig embryos to see if they could become capable of growing human organs.

However, that research has so far been unsuccessful, according to NPR. Now, the team of scientists chose to experiment with monkeys because they are much more closely related to humans genetically.

The researchers reported that after one day, they were able to detect human cells growing in of the injected embryos. However, most of the embryos died during the day experiment, and those that survived only retained 4 to 7 percent human cells, according to the South China Morning Post. Nonetheless, the scientists found that the research represented significant progress for this type of study.

We eat pigs, not humans. Would you still enjoy bacon if it came from the pig who had nursed your liver for the past six months? More powerfully, the prospect of pig-humans also confuses the moral compass. Biologically merging pigs with humans reminds us of our shared similarities, something that we mostly try to forget when savouring the smell of frying bacon.

We tend to maintain clear boundaries between those animals we eat and those we do not , as this helps to resolve the sense of discomfort that we might otherwise feel about using animals for food. It was this very confusion of boundaries that led to outrage over the prospect of horse meat in burgers during the horse meat scandal ; horses are perceived as pets or companions, not food. If confusing pets with animals we eat creates discontent, then confusing those same meat-animals with our own kind is sure to create moral and gustatory hesitation.

Beyond baffling our palate, it also confounds our understanding of whether it is an animal from whom we are harvesting our next-generation organs, or some kind of sub-human entity. In the end, while mythical hybrid beasts may have caused alarm for the Greeks, it would seem that our own objection to growing our next heart in the breast of a pig has more to do with existential angst and a disruption of the moral order.

Whether or not we should use animals for these purposes, or for the satisfaction of human needs more broadly, is a topic for another time. Yet it is safe to say that our personal fear of this scientific advance — the queasiness we feel in the gut — may be mostly to do with how it destabilises our perceived human uniqueness and undermines our own moral superiority than anything to do with broader concerns over hybrids themselves.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence. A HUMAN-chimpanzee hybrid was born in a Florida lab years ago before being killed by panicked doctors, according to a scientist.

Gallup, who developed the famous mirror "self-recognition" test which proved primates could acknowledge their own reflection, claims his former university professor told him that a humanzee baby was born at a research facility where he used to work. Details of the top secret experiments come as a part-human, part monkey embryo was created by scientists in California with the hopes of using them to grow stem cells.

Luis trained as a zoologist, but now works as a science and technology educator. In his spare time he builds 3D-printed robots, in the hope that he will be spared when the revolution inevitably comes. Home Nature Is it possible for humans and chimpanzees to interbreed?