Scientists in China are creating monkey-human embryos to fuck with our future, or maybe fix it

We already have human-duck things, cat-humans things, and centipede-human things, so why couldn’t we just make our own missing link? According to a report by El País, a biologist and administrator at Spain’s Murcia Catholic University (UCAM), Estrella Núñez, has confirmed that actual monkey-human embryos are being made in China. It seems that science is currently asking, hey, why watch The Planet of the Apes when you can just live it?

It seems that the goal here isn’t to spark a future war against humans, but rather to create a plethora of “human-animal chimeras” to see if it’s possible to create organs in animal bodies that could be used in transplants for humans. The Spanish-born biologist Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte of the Salk Institute in California is aiding in the research, alongside team members from UCAM and monkey researchers in China that create the modified monkey embryos by deactivating genes that are essential to forming organs, and then injecting human stem cells into the embryos, which can create any type of tissue, to grow human organs.

Sure, this entire story sounds fake as hell, but apparently Izpisúa and his team already conducted “the first experiment of human and pig chimeras in the world” back in 2017. He also created rat-mouse chimera embryos to see if that could work, and it looks like it did, thanks to a DNA-editing tool called Crispr, which sounds like a Postmates-alternative app that delivers salty snack foods. There’s no word yet as to what kind of breakthroughs this research will reveal, but we don’t need Tim Burton to tell us why human-monkeys are a bad idea.