Japan Grants Scientist Permission to Create Human/Animal Hybrids
Josh Millican
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If horror movies have taught us anything, it’s that creating human/animal hybrids is a recipe for disaster! The Soska sisters will be exploring themes of “transhumanism” in their upcoming remake of David Cronenberg’s Rabid, but this concept is on the verge of going from abstraction to reality.
This weekend, we set eyes on a report from Global News announcing that a scientist in Japan has been granted permission to create a human/rat hybrid!
After a ban on the practice was lifted this year, Hiromitsu Nakauchi — who leads teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California — is planning to splice human cells to see if they will grow beyond the current limit of two weeks, Nature reports. If Nakauchi accomplishes this, it will be the first successful experiment of its kind in Japan. His ultimate goal is to grow a human pancreas inside an animal so that it can later be transplanted into a patient.
“If we are able to generate human organs in animals we could help many, many people,” Nakauchi told the Stanford Medicine magazine last year.
Let’s hope things turn out better for Nakauchi and his team than they do for the characters in Rabid!
Related Article: Images from RABID Remake Get Soska Sisters Suspended from Twitter
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