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I know I posted about this last month, but this subject is just so interesting and terrifyingly intriguing. Scientists from China, America, and Spain have been working together to generate monkey-human chimeric embryos ex-vivo. Though thus far none have been anywhere near gestation, surviving only up to 20 days, the embryos actually maintained a high number of human cells as they grew. They used embryos from the long-tailed macaque, studying the competency of the interaction when injected with human extended pluripotent stem cells (hEPSCs) which are stem cells that have the potential of becoming many different types of cells.Each monkey embryo was injected with 25 human cells. According to the study, "after one day, human cells were detected in 132 embryos. After 10 days, 103 of the chimeric embryos were still developing. Survival soon began declining, and by day 19, only three chimeras were still alive."The study claims they were able to, "demonstrate that hEPSCs survived, proliferated, and generated several peri- and early post-implantation cell lineages inside monkey embryos," as well as, "uncovered signaling events underlying interspecific crosstalk that may help shape the unique developmental trajectories of human and monkey cells within chimeric embryos."The article states, "an important next step for this research is to evaluate in more detail all the molecular pathways that are involved in this interspecies communication, with the immediate goal of finding which pathways are vital to the developmental process."Izpisua Belmonte from the Gene Expression Laboratory, Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and the Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences at Peking University in Beijing, China, apparently believes this is ethical experimentation, saying, "it is our responsibility as scientists to conduct our research thoughtfully, following all the ethical, legal, and social guidelines in place."The scientists "hope to use the chimeras not only to study early human development and to model disease, but to develop new approaches for drug screening, as well as potentially generating transplantable cells, tissues, or organs."Article:https://phys.org/news/2021-04-human-monkey-chimeric-embryos.htmlStudy:https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)00305-6#%20