Is it possible to splice animals

Technology has also made it possible to engineer human DNA in living animals, either for basic research or, more recently, to produce large quantities of proteins used as medicine. The film Splice made it sound as if joining the DNA of different species is intrinsically difficult. In reality, this is a misconception: all living things share the same genetic material, so there is no technical impediment to cutting and pasting together whatever you want regardless of its origin. On the other hand, it would indeed be difficult to create extreme hybrids stable enough to survive.

It's still technically challenging even to clone exact copies of higher mammals, Dolly the Sheep's fame notwithstanding.

Where Splice did excel was in portraying the atmosphere of the modern lab. The scientists are casually dressed, mostly young and are shown interacting, joking and bantering as scientists the world over are wont to do.

Far from occurring in a solitary ivory tower, science is a communal endeavour shaped by collaboration and competition, camaraderie and ambition, passion and drive. We are shown researchers fighting over the music as when one tells the other that the experiment isn't working because of her "fascist" German techno pop, and reaches over to put on some jazz and zooming across the lab on wheeled chairs munching slices of pizza and boxes of takeaway Chinese noodles. Although the acronym of the biotech company's name spells out NERD, these scientists are anything but - they even have sex with one another, for pity's sake.

I was positively drooling with envy over the lab kit. The fateful hybrid experiment sets off with a single Eppendorf tube set lovingly afloat in a gleaming digital water bath. We also see beautiful flow hoods, centrifuges, shakers and all the expected accoutrement of a modern molecular genetics lab - if they had shown any bubbling, smoking liquids or Van der Graaf generators, I would have been out of there.

But pigs have a notable similarity to humans. Though they take less time to gestate, their organs look a lot like ours. Not that these similarities made the task any easier. The team discovered that, in order to introduce human cells into the pigs without killing them, they had to get the timing just right. When those just-right human cells were injected into the pig embryos, the embryos survived.

Then they were put into adult pigs, which carried the embryos for between three and four weeks before they were removed and analyzed. The human tissue appears to slow the growth of the embryo, notes Cheng, and organs grown from such embryos as they develop now would likely be rejected by humans, since they would contain so much pig tissue. The next big step, says Cheng, is to figure out whether it's possible to increase the number of human cells the embryos can tolerate.

The current method is a start, but it still isn't clear if that hurdle can be overcome. Belmonte agrees, noting that it could take years to use the process to create functioning human organs. The technique could be put to use much sooner as a way to study human embryo development and understand disease. And those real-time insights could be just as valuable as the ability to grow an organ. Very intriguing.

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Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Our society continues to struggle with xenophobia and racism, so we may also find prejudices and legal dilemmas developing for genetically engineered humans never mind human-animal hybrids. Would people born using technologies such as CRISPR be allowed to visit or emigrate to countries where their very creation was illegal?

Would it be illegal for them to have their own children and spread their genetically altered genome? This kind of conflict between international human rights legislation and domestic policy is yet to be tested but could have grave consequences. On the other side of the divide, if countries with strong regulations move too slowly to allow treatments that may be lifesaving or disability preventing, it could worsen health inequality.

We already have serious global problems with distributive justice , the ways in which services or technologies are only accessible to the privileged. If a particular illness could be prevented through CRISPR, is it right that someone should have to risk their child developing the disease just because they cannot afford to travel to a country where the technique is legal?

Unfortunately, the obvious solution — internationally agreed standards and regulations — may be a pipedream. We have consistently failed to find global consensus on gene editing issues, just as with embryo research.

Even if it is possible to reach common ground, developing and implementing mutually acceptable terms that are flexible enough to handle the inevitable further technological progress, will take many years.

For now, proposals for concerted effort to keep track of gene editing research may be the best we can do. But it seems likely that more and more gene editing and other controversial practices will take place in a variety of regulated and unregulated circumstances.

Sadly, it may be the case that little progress is made until the types of problems outlined above become all too real.