A chimera or chimaera is a single organism (usually an animal) that is composed of two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated from different zygotes involved in sexual reproduction. If the different cells have emerged from the same zygote, the organism is called a mosaic. Chimeras are formed from at least four parent cells (two fertilized eggs or early embryos fused together). Each population of cells keeps its own character and the resulting organism is a mixture of tissues. Chimeras are typically seen in animals; there are some reports on human chimerism.[1]
Chimeras can often breed, but the fertility and type of offspring depends on which cell line gave rise to the ovaries or testes; varying degrees of intersexuality may result if one set of cells is genetically female and another genetically male.
Put another way, the chimera is formed from the merging of two nonidentical twins (although a similar merging presumably occurs with identical twins, but as their DNA is almost identical, the presence would not be immediately detectable in a very early (zygote or blastocyst) phase. As such, they can be male, female, or hermaphroditic (both male and female reproductive organs).
Scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Centre produced the animals, known as chimeras, by sticking together between three and six rhesus monkey embryos in the early stages of their development. Three animals were born at the laboratory, a singleton and twins, and were said to be healthy, with no apparent birth defects following the controversial technique.
The chimeras have tissues and organs made up of cells that come from each of the contributing embryos. The mixtures of cells carried up to six distinct genomes. "The cells never fuse, but they stay together and work together to form tissues and organs," said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, who led the research. "The possibilities for science are enormous." Scientists named the singleton Chimero, and the twins Roku and Hex, meaning six in Japanese and Greek.
Hex was born after merging six individual embryos, according to a report in the journal Cell. "To our knowledge, these infants are the world's first primate chimeras," the authors write.While all three monkeys are biologically male, blood tests revealed that Roku carried both male and female cells.
Tests on the foetuses confirmed that all of the animals' organs and tissues contained cells from more than one embryo.
"If we want to move stem cell therapies from the lab to clinics and from the mouse to humans, we need to understand what these primate cells can and can't do. We need to study them in humans, including human embryos," said Mitalipov.
A major milestone in chimera experimentation occurred in 1984, when a chimeric geep was produced by combining embryos from a goat and a sheep, and survived to adulthood.[11] The creation of the "geep" revealed several complexities to chimera development. In implanting a goat embryo for gestation in a sheep, the sheep's immune system would reject the developing goat embryo, whereas a "geep" embryo, sharing markers of immunity with both sheep and goats, was able to survive implantation in either of its parent species. In August 2003, researchers at the Shanghai Second Medical University in China reported that they had successfully fused human skin cells and dead rabbit eggs to create the first human chimeric embryos. The embryos were allowed to develop for several days in a laboratory setting, then destroyed to harvest the resulting stem cells.[12] In 2007, scientists at the University of Nevada School of Medicine created a sheep whose blood contained 15% human cells and 85% sheep cells.[13] The implications of increasingly realizable projects using human-animal hybrids for biopharmaceutical production, and potentially for producing cells or organs, have raised a host of ethical and safety issues.
Originally posted by Biigs
reply to post by nobodysavedme
What on earth would be the reason behind doing that?!!?!?!
Just because new sciences make unimaginable things possible, does NOT mean they will go ahead and do the worst thing with the new tech!
What about combining Hawking, Dawkins, Darwin etc etc etc?
SOmwhere in a dark lab many floors below the earths crust there is such a mind being grown, maybe not, but super hitler? Thats just..... really out there man
