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6 December 2019
FITTER. BETTER. HAPPIER.
Victor Tangermann
Breakthroughs

First-Ever “Pig-Monkey Chimeras” Born in Chinese Lab

The goal is to grow human organs inside animals.
by Victor Tangermann / 7 hours ago

According to a New Scientist exclusive, the first ever piglets with cells from monkeys have been born in a Chinese lab.

“This is the first report of full-term pig-monkey chimeras,” State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology researcher Tang Hai, a co-author on a new paper about the birth, told the magazine.

The researchers’ final aim is to grow human organs inside animals — but that future is still many years out. These particular piglets unfortunately died within a week of birth, with the exact cause of death still unknown.

To create the pig-monkey chimeras, Hai and his team grew a monkey cell culture, derived embryonic stem cells from it, and injected them into pig embryos four days after fertilization.

The results leave something to be desired. Only two out of ten piglets turned out to be chimeras. The team had to implant more than 4,000 embryos to get to these results.

“Given the extremely low chimeric efficiency and the deaths of all the animals, I actually see this as fairly discouraging,” stem cell biologist Paul Knoepfler from the University of California, Davis, told New Scientist.

The monkey cells in the two chimeras were spread across a number of vital organs, but only represented a very low proportion of cells — between one-in-1,000 and one-in-10,000, according to New Scientist.

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23Mofang

Chinese 23andMe Knockoff Gives Different Results From 23andMe

"It's a gimmick. It's so ridiculous."
by Dan Robitzski / December 05 2019

23Mofang, a Chinese DNA testing startup that’s highly similar to 23andMe — down to its name — is giving customers some interesting results.

Notably, it totally missed Bloomberg reporter K. Oanh Ha’s predominately Vietnamese heritage. That’s because the company relies entirely on a pool of genetic data from Chinese participants, according to Bloomberg, so ancestry reports only trace people’s DNA back to various regions of China.

But more troubling was how the 23Mofang also made questionable predictions about Ha’s future and current health risks.

Ha took both tests, and the differences were stark. 23andMe, for instance, makes some health predictions — Ha noticed that her reported risk of diabetes kept changing on her before vanishing and resurfacing with some legalese disclaimers.

But that pales in comparison to 23Mofang. Among other things, the Chinese company predicted that she would probably live until the age of 95 and was at risk for a long list of diseases including type 2 diabetes and bipolar disorder.

“Ninety-five years old? There’s no way to put a number on longevity,” Scripps Research Translational Institute founder and geneticist Eric Topol told Bloomberg. “It’s a gimmick. It’s so ridiculous.”

Also concerning about 23Mofang’s results: in breaking down customer’s ancestry, it tells them the extent to which they’re of Uighur descent. The Chinese government is actively persecuting against its Muslim Uighur population, having rounded up at least a million of them into detention camps.

Because some of the people sent to those camps have been subjected to genetic research, the ancestry report raises red flags — especially because 23Mofang CEO Zhou Kun told Bloomberg that the company would share people’s results with the government if it were asked to.

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