From: Franklin Fields <fields.nul>
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 23:53:53 -0500 (EST)
Archived: Tue, 03 Feb 2009 07:47:17 -0500
Subject: Study Questions Usefulness Of Animal-Human Embryos


Studies like this make alien hybrid stories seem less strange...

Quotes from article:

"Opponents objected to mixing human and animal material and
worried that such research could lead to genetically modified
babies.

Hybrid embryos have been made elsewhere, but there's no widely
accepted report of getting stem cells from them. Animal eggs are
attractive because human ones are hard to get for research...

...For the new work, Lanza and colleagues put human DNA into human, cow
and rabbit eggs and grew them into early embryos. In embryos from human
eggs, they found that patterns of gene activity resembled those in
ordinary human embryos. But with the human-animal hybrid embryos, the
patterns were much different."

If we are creating hybrids to harvest stem cells, is it a huge
leap to think that a scientist may one day allow a hybrid embryo
to mature?

Full article at:

http://tinyurl.com/bepa53


Regards,

Frank