Mar 27 2007
Sheeple - the new, real pigoon?
Margaret Atwood wrote about pigoons in her book, Oryx and Crake - pigs modified with human stem cells in order to grow organs to be used for transplants. Looks like now scientists have actually created sheep that are “15% human” by “injecting adult human cells into a sheep’s foetus.” According to an article in The Mail On Sunday, Professor Esmail Zanjani (University of Nevada) has spent the last seven years working on the process:
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.
Let’s hope these “sheeple” don’t evolve the way of Atwood’s pigoons…
(via /. )
