this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
16 points (94.4% liked)

Biology

1424 readers
1 users here now

This is a general community to discuss of all things related to biology!

For a more specific community about asking questions to biologists, you can also visit:

/c/askbiologists@lemmy.world

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] feduser934@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

A possible long term goal here is to improve human life by creating a monkey with some human organs for drug testing. This field also has the prospect of growing human organs in pigs for transplants.

To be clear, being chimeric is not inheritable because the DNA is not being mixed. The animal has some cells from one species, and other cells from a different species.

Though you can argue about the ethics of this kind of animal research, I think biomedical research in general is valuable. To improve human welfare, I think it's important for humanity to have both low risk short term strategies (providing people with food and water), and long term high risk strategies (basic biological research).