Scientists create a sheep that's 15% human / Gods and Monsters

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Wed Mar-28-07 04:41 PM
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Scientists create a sheep that's 15% human / Gods and Monsters

original-daily mail

Now scientists create a sheep that's 15% human

By CLAUDIA JOSEPH - More by this author � Last updated at 15:53pm on 27th March 2007

News:
Scientists have created the world's first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.

The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells - and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer.

Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and �5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep's foetus.

He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep.

The process would involve extracting stem cells from the donor's bone marrow and injecting them into the peritoneum of a sheep's foetus. When the lamb is born, two months later, it would have a liver, heart, lungs and brain that are partly human and available for transplant.

"We would take a couple of ounces of bone marrow cells from the patient,' said Prof Zanjani, whose work is highlighted in a Channel 4 programme tomorrow.

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***related article***

link:www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_401.html|original- mother jones]

Gods and Monsters

Talking apes, flying pigs, superhumans with armadillo attributes, and other strange considerations of Dr. Stuart Newman's fight to patent a human/animal chimera

By Mark Dowie

ON APRIL FOOLS' DAY 1998, within hours of reading U.S. patent application No. 08/993,564, the Honorable Bruce Lehman did something no other commissioner of patents had done in the 200-year history of America's oldest government agency. He stepped before a cluster of microphones and announced that the patent would never be approved. No half-human "monsters" would be patented, Lehman declared angrily, or any other "immoral inventions."

Legal scholars -- accustomed to an office bound by statute to remain silent until patents are approved or rejected -- were shocked. Forgoing the traditional 18-month review period, Lehman had issued a marching order to his staff to reject a patent application they had barely read, rather as if a judge had instructed a jury that the defendant was guilty before the trial began. Furthermore, to support his decision, Lehman cited an 1817 court ruling that excluded inventions "injurious to the well-being, good policy, or good morals of society." But patent law had long since been amended to say that if an applicant could claim constructive use for a patent, he or she could not be denied simply because there might be dangerous or unethical uses of the invention.

"Even attorneys who worshiped the system were horrified," recalls former patent examiner Peter di Mauro, who has since left the agency. Research biologists and biotech executives also felt blind-sided, hearing in Commissioner Lehman's outburst a threat to the hard-earned clearance they had won from the Supreme Court 18 years earlier to patent "anything under the sun made by man" -- even living organisms.
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