It might take years for patients in need of life-saving organ transplants to find a qualified donor. The creation of procedures to cultivate healthy transplantable organs in the lab, which for some entails cultivating human organs inside animal hosts, may be the final answer to the organ scarcity dilemma.
In biology, scientists have long explored the idea of chimeras—beings composed of components from several different animals. Even naturally occurring chimeras can occur when two fertilized eggs in the same womb occasionally combine to form a single individual. But when cells from two different species are combined to create hybrid chimeras, we often have concerns, particularly when the hybrid is partially human. These experiments raise challenging ethical and philosophical issues by obfuscating the distinctions between humans and animals that we use to defend animal testing in the first place.
Japanese scientists are attempting to produce human organs using the newly legalized hybrid studies, which became permissible earlier this year. Previously, regulations compelled scientists to abort human-animal hybrid embryos after 14 days. The plan is to give the host animal embryo human cells instead of the capacity to develop a particular organ on its own, in the hopes that the host animal would use the human cells to construct the missing organ.
“We will determine the effectiveness of this strategy in due time, but we must take many ethical factors into account. For example, researchers could incorporate human cells into various organs within the host animal.” Before biotechnology compels us to make morally difficult decisions, we must find a way to balance our cultural conceptions of humans with our attitudes toward other creatures.
