Shortage Of Organs For Transplantation -- Is More Research on Human-Animal Chimeras the Right Approach?

This piece was originally published on Bionews and co-authored with Giulia Cavaliere. You can read the original piece here. It is time to discuss, once again, the lifting of a moratorium on research. We are not talking about the CRISPR genome-editing moratorium, but about the 20 August announcement by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to lift the moratorium on research involving chimeric human/non-human embryos. The use of federal funds for this kind of research had been previously banned by the NIH in September 2015. Although it does not state it explicitly, the NIH announcement seems to have been triggered by Harvard professor George Church's research on growing humanised organ models in non-human animals, namely pigs. Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, followed with a perspective piece in PLOS Biology, stating that the benefits of this kind of research are so great that we should no longer hesitate to fund it. The piece by Hyun addresses traditional concerns in animal ethics, such as safety, the moral status of the non-human animal (in this case, the human/non-human chimera) and the exploitation of non-human animals in research. We agree with his precautionary stance which, is consistent with the existent ethical standards for chimera research developed by the Internal Society for Stem Cell Research in 2007, and with more emphasis on animal welfare than on speculative concerns about moral humanization...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news