Wired's unethical experiments: The Ape Man

Wired recently published an article titled, "Seven Creepy Experiments That Could Teach Us So Much (If They Weren’t So Wrong)." Among their picks is the creation of an "ape man" that would come about through cross-breeding a human with a chimpanzee:

The premise:
The great biologist Stephen Jay Gould called it “the most potentially interesting and ethically unacceptable experiment I can imagine.” The idea? Mating a human with a chimp. His interest in this monstrosity grew out of his work with snails, closely related species of which can display wide variation in shell architecture. Gould attributed this diversity to a few master genes, which turn on and off the shared genes responsible for constructing the shells. Perhaps, he speculated, the large visible differences between humans and apes were also a factor of developmental timing. He pointed out that adult humans have physical traits, such as larger craniums and wide-set eyes, that resemble infant chimpanzees, a phenomenon known as neoteny—the retention of juvenile traits in adults. Gould theorized that over the course of evolution, a tendency toward neoteny might have helped give rise to human beings. By watching the development of a half-human, half-chimp, researchers could explore this theory in a firsthand (and truly creepy) way.

How it works:
It would probably be frighteningly easy: The same techniques used for in vitro fertilization would likely yield a viable hybrid human-chimp embryo. (Researchers have already spanned a comparable genetic gap in breeding a rhesus monkey with a baboon.) Chimps have 24 pairs of chromosomes, and humans 23, but this is not an absolute barrier to breeding. The offspring would likely have an odd number of chromosomes, though, which might make them unable to reproduce themselves. As for the gestation and birth, it could be done the natural way. Chimpanzees are born slightly smaller than humans, on average—around 4 pounds—and so comparative anatomy would argue for growing the embryo in a human uterus.

The payoff:
Gould’s idea about neoteny remains controversial, to say the least. “It got a lot of scrutiny and has been disproved in many ways,” says Daniel Lieberman, a Harvard professor of human evolutionary biology. But Alexander Harcourt, professor emeritus of anthropology at UC Davis, regards neoteny as “still a viable concept.” This forbidden experiment would help to resolve that debate and, in a broader sense, illuminate how two species with such similar genomes could be so different. Its outcome would take biologists deep into the origin of the species we care about most: ourselves. Let’s just hope we can find a less disturbing route to get there.

Chimerical performance art

Performance artist Marion Laval-Jeantet has injected herself with horse blood plasma as part of an artistic project called "May the Horse Live in Me" that seeks to explore trans-species relationships. She prepared her body to accept the horse blood plasma by getting injected with different horse immunoglobulins over the course of several months:

These foreign animal antibodies were injected in progressively larger amounts to allow her to build up tolerance in a process that she referred to as “mithridatisation,” after the Persian king of Pontus, Mithridates VI, who supposedly built up an immunity to poison by regularly consuming small doses of it.

Earlier this year, after months of preparation, she was injected with horse blood plasma, which contained the full spectrum of immunoglobulins without provoking an allergic reaction.

As part of the performance piece she also wore a set of stilts with hooves on the end to feel at one with the horse. She walked around with the donor horse in a “communication ritual” before having her hybrid blood extracted and freeze-dried.

She explained to Centre Press that the whole process made her feel “hyperpowerful, hypersensitive and hypernervous.” She added: “I had a feeling of being superhuman. I was not normal in my body. I had all of the emotions of a herbivore. I couldn’t sleep and I felt a little bit like a horse.”

Art Orienté Objet has a long history of working in the bioart space, having created other pieces including Skin Culture, which uses bioengineered skin as a canvas for animal-shaped tattoos.

Check out the video:



Via.

Over 150 human-animal hybrids grown in UK in past three years

Wow, the Daily Mail is reporting that over 150 human-animal hybrids have been grown in UK labs since 2008, the same year the Brits passed the Human Fertilisation Embryology Act allowing for this kind of research. For some reason these transgenic embryos have been produced secretively for the past three years.

Specifically, the scientists produced animal eggs fertilised by a human sperm, ‘cybrids’, in which a human nucleus is implanted into an animal cell, and ‘chimeras’, in which human cells are mixed with animal embryos.

The purpose of the research is to develop embryonic stem cells which can be used to treat a range of incurable illnesses.

It's worth noting that human-animal hybrids are also created in other countries, many of which have little or no regulation.