R
ecent studies have shown that even though about 50 percent of adults in the United States have registered as organ donors, more than 100,000 people in the United States are waiting for a transplant, and many will die waiting. The increasing scarcity of human organ donors has driven research scientists to examine options other than donation from deceased patients, such as xenotransplantation, or the use of human organs that were grown in animals.
Xenotransplantation experiments are being conducted in sheep, pigs, and, most recently, in nonhuman primates. In July, a group of scientists from Spain and the US claimed to have successfully created embryos containing both monkey and human cells as a preliminary step in examining the use of such human-monkey chimeras as hosts to produce human organs. According to published reports, the research was conducted in China “to avoid legal issues.”
Xenotransplantation experiments rely on applying gene editing ...
