It's a Sheep, It's a Man, It's a SheepMan!

It is now being reported that scientists have bread the world's first human-sheep chimera. It has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.

The sheep have 15 percent human cells, while retaining 85 percent animal cells. This evolving of the species carries the possibility of animal organ transplants into humans into a whole new arena.

This process has been a project of Professor Esmail Zanjan, of the University of Nevada. He has spent nearly eight years and about 9.8 million dollars perfecting injecting adult human cells into sheep foetus.

His present accomplishments include creating a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells. Zanjani hopes to be able to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient by using their own bone marrow stem cells to create the particular flock of sheep.

Zanjani explains that they would take several ounces of bone marrow cells from the patient, isolate the stem cells, inject the cells into the peritoneum of the sheep and then these cells would get distributed throughout the metabolic system and into the circulatory system of all the organs of the body.

In ideal situations when the lamb would be born two months later, it would have a liver, heart, lungs, and brain that are partly human and available for transplant.

Presently, un the UK alone, there are 7, 1768 patients waiting for organ transplants and about two thirds of them are expected to die before organs become available. Scientists at Kings' College, London and the Northern Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle have applied to the government's fertility watchdog group, HFEA for permission to start this experimentation with chimeras.

This development will naturally raise the criticism that scientists are playing God. The big concern revolves around so called 'silent viruses', that are harmless in animals but could be catastrophically virulent in humans. Today's HIV virus is an example of a disease that is only naturally occurring in monkeys, but has jumped to humans.

While on the other side of the issue animal rights activists fear that mixing animal and human cells will eventually create cellular fusion that would create a hybrid with features and characteristics that are both human and sheep. Prof. Zanjani, when presented with this hypothesis said, "Transplanting the cells into foetal sheep at this early stage does not result in fusion at all."

Famous last words!!

Sources: Sheep That's 15% Human Xinhuanet www.CCTV.com
Sheep That's 15% Human Peoples Daily Online English.people.com
Half Man Half Sheep The Daily Telegraph www.news.com.au