Creating Human-Animal Hybrids Is Bad for Humans – and Worse for Other Animals
Spanish experimenters have created the world’s first human-monkey hybrid in a laboratory in China.
They carried out the experiment by injecting human stem cells into a monkey embryo to produce hybrid human-monkey embryos, or chimeras. If this sounds wrong, that’s because it is – yet experimenters plan to keep pursuing this “Frankenscience”.
Similar experiments we’ve seen in the past include attempts to grow human pancreatic tissue inside live rats and mice and the manipulation of pig and sheep embryos so that they contain human DNA.
Organ Factories for Humans = Pain and Suffering for Animals
Whether experimenters use monkeys, pigs, or mice, creating human-animal hybrids as organ factories for humans doesn’t necessarily solve medical problems but does lead to inevitable misery for intelligent, sensitive beings.
To produce animals containing human material, animal mothers are imprisoned in laboratories and subjected to invasive procedures, which may include the extraction of their eggs or the implantation of embryos in their wombs. At the end of their short, miserable lives, they’ll be killed.
This kind of horror story belongs only in the world of fiction.
Irrelevant and Risky to Humans
Experiments like these are often crude and inaccurate – they could lead to many unintended consequences for humans, including severe health problems that experimenters can neither anticipate nor control.
To understand more about human diseases, the world’s most forward-thinking scientists are developing and using methods that supersede the use of animals and are actually relevant to human health. These modern techniques include sophisticated tests using human cells and tissues, organs-on-chips, micro-models of the brain, and computer models. Studies have repeatedly shown that non-animal methodologies are better at modelling human diseases and predicting how drugs will act than crude tests on animals are.
What You Can Do
Animals are not a collection of spare parts. The best way to find organs for patients in desperate need is to encourage people to register as organ donors, [link] not to pour research funding into monstrous experiments. That money would be much better spent by investing in humane, cutting-edge science that could eradicate the need for many organ transplants in the first place.
Please call on the government to commit to phasing out all experiments on animals and to redirect resources away from these unreliable tests:
