Monday, March 26, 2007

Men in sheep's clothing

Scientists in Nevada are cutting foetuses out of sheep, injecting human stem cells into the peritaneum and replacing them in the sheep. The lambs subsequently born have about 15% of human cells which tend to form clusters in the animal, 40% gathering in the liver. They hope to be able to use these livers successfully for transplant operations because the presence of human cells should mean that the organs won't be rejected by a human body unlike previous experiments with pigs' liver transplants which worked for only a few days as there was no similarity of DNA. It is rather a grim thought to think of flocks of designer sheep being bred with human livers. Perhaps they'll advance to human brains at some point. What concerns me is if any of the meat were sold on to unwitting consumers.

5 Comments:

Blogger kinglear said...

Don't know if it still exists but there used to be a clinic called La Prairie in Clarens on the Lake of Geneva that specialised in injecting cells from Lamb fotuses into people to make them age slower/ feel younger etc. It made a fortune at one time, but I think there was a bit of a scandal.
Seems like the corollary of your story.

9:51 am  
Blogger Whispering Walls said...

That's interesting. Didn't they use monkey glands for anti-aging in the 1920s?

10:01 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Folks, but surely many people in Britain now appear to have had the brains of sheep for quite some time.

This is all very alarming - I will not even eat genetically modified vegetables because of the dire effect they may have on the digestive system..

And you only have to look up on the internet the scandal of US drug companies conning the public that milk from cattle injected with hormones was safe, when they knew it wasn't, to have some cause for caution in this kind of area..

10:35 am  
Blogger kinglear said...

Leamington Spa? I think he had never been there....

9:53 pm  
Blogger Eurodog said...

Listen, folks, let's get real: we do not know what we eat.
Cancer, heart failure, strokes, Alzheimer and the list goes on are all due to our modern way of life. Stress, environment, etc, etc ... and what we eat.

9:18 am  

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