Japan’s Chimera Embryo Regulations Raise Concerns

the-Scientist.com | KATARINA ZIMMER | 4-4-2019

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By William Rimmer Link
Japanese regulators have effectively given the green light to research involving human-animal chimera embryos, which are created by implanting human pluripotent stem cells into animals in early development. The revised guidelines, issued in early March, lift a previous requirement to terminate such embryos after 14 days.

The revisions now pave the way for Japanese scientists to study how to grow human organs in animals as an alternative to organ transplantation, and to produce better models to study human development and disease.

However, they also raise some ethical concerns, as a group of Japanese bioethicists at the Kyoto University note in a letter published today (April 4) in Cell Stem Cell. For instance, the guidelines would allow researchers to create chimeras with human cells populating animal brains—something that concerns the Japanese public. They also don’t explicitly prohibit chimera embryos made from human and nonhuman primate cells, which could take experiments into ethically uncharted territory. Read more.

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...and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind ... the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind ...the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. -Genesis 1

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