When I was taking social studies in highschool I remember my teacher once mentioning something that some kind of animal had secretly been bred with a human for some sort of insane government experiment, probably to explore a possibility of organ harvesting or something. Anyway, he said that some hybrids were produced, but were obviously malformed and did not live long. What I’m wondering is…is there any truth to this story? Or is it just a bunch of science fiction?
There are a handful of cases (and rumours of cases) of chimps that were suspected to be human/chimp hybrids, but as far as I know, all those that have been actually available for detailed observation (as opposed to consisting of blurry photos and anecdotes), have turned out to be entirely chimp (sometimes unusual chimps, but certainly not hybrids).
There are pigs (and bacteria, I think) that have (artifically-inserted) human genes and are used for producing medicines or hormones etc.
There’s too much difference in the genome for that to be a possibility. Even if the egg was to fertilize, say, they used a device to insert sperm directly into the egg. The developing embryo may be very likely to abort itself.
I say no truth. But I am just going on my opinion… apart from common sense, I have no evidence to prove contrary to your statements.
There was a show on The Discovery Channel a week ago entitled, “Humanzee.” It discussed the possiblities of a Human-Chimp hybrid and featured an odd creature by the name of Oliver, who “looked eerily human,” was smarter than your average chimp, always walked upright, and was attracted to human women. Other chimps paid him no attention. He also had one more chromosome than a human and one less than a chimp. Personally, I didn’t think he looked terribly human. Most likely he was a chimp-bonobo hybrid, but the scientists interviewed for the show said it wasn’t only possible to have a humanzee, but probably likely. There were rumors about it having been done by a team of scientists in China. The Discovery Channel is The National Enquirer of science but I’ll take what I can get.
Oliver is genetically a chimpanzee in every sense of the word. In fact tests even indicate which wild tribe he was taken from.
“In 1997, a series of genetic tests finally settled the question of what exactly Oliver is made of. Geneticists at the University of Chicago determined that Oliver is simply a chimp, not a missing link, and certainly no human-chimp hybrid. He also possesses the standard chimpanzee chromosome count of 48.
“So the report of 47 chromosomes was either a misinterpretation or purposeful misrepresentation,” said Dr. David Ledbetter, who performed the analysis and found to his surprise that the results matched tests done two decades earlier. “The chimp-human question was settled twenty years ago,” he said.”
http://www.parascope.com/en/cryptozoo/missingLinks10.htm
Come on we’re supposed to be about fighting ignorance, not propagating it. As you say Discovery is like National Enquirer so why repeat their gabage as fact?
For those interested in facts on human/animal hybridisation here are some of the very many past threads
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb...threadid=185926
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb...threadid=196816
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb...threadid=189418
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb...threadid=155521
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb…?threadid=64664
Basically it’s a case of there beoing no evidence of such an event but a human X chimp hybrid might be possible in theory.
Satyricon is your teacher wasn’t just making this stuff up (a distinct possibility) then you probably misundertsood them. Maybe someone has done research on in vitro fertilisation to produce human animal hybrids but the hybrids wouldn’t have lived past the earliest divisions. That is what they meant by them being malformed and not living long, not that they were born malformed.
Standard chromosomal studies fully supported Ledbetter’s findings that Oliver had the diploid chromesome count expected for chimpanzees (i.e. 48 or 24 pairs). They also revealed that his chromosomes possessed banding patterns typical for the common chimpanzee but different from those of humans and bonobos, thereby excluding any possibility of Oliver being a hybrid.
Moreover, when they sequenced a specific portion (312 bp region) of the D-loop region of Oliver’s mitochondrial DNA they discovered that its sequence corresponded very closely indeed with that of the Central African subspecies of common chimpanzee; the closest correspondence of all was with a chimp specimen from Gabon in Central-West Africa. This all strongly suggests that Oliver also originated from this region and is simply a common chimp - an identity entirely consistent, therefore, with my own little-publicised opinion from 1993.
So much for The Discovery Channel. :smack:
You must have missed the end of the show, because it detailed exactly the same info presented here about him being all chimp and the area he was likely from. DC has issues, but in this case they seemed to get their facts straight (after nearly an hour of speculation and what-ifs, of course).
There was of course the early hominid (s) from which Homo Sapien evolved. Would they count as anumal-human hybrids?
I expect teacher got his info about gene replacement in pigs to create human compatable organs, and watched the film “O Lucky Man”, and then wore his tin-foil hat too tight for his own good.
It’s rumored that Michael Jackson has sucessfully bred with a human being. If those kids aren’t corss-breeds then I don’t know what is.
Yup. So much for watching most of a show.
Then of course there was the Seinfeld episode with the pig-man… 
Could the teacher have been talking about the “baboon heart” transplant from 10 years or so ago? A baboon was killed and its heart harvested in an experimental attempt to keep a baby alive long enough for a human heart to be found. I believe the baby girl lived only a few days; I’m assuming her body rejected the baboon heart.
I just googled “baby baboon heart” and came up with the following. Seems like there was a lot more of this than I’d thought :eek:
http://www.viewingspace.com/genetics_culture/pages_genetics_culture/gc_gloss/xenotransplant_history/xenotransplant_hist.htm
what about going all Jurassic Park and using humans as surrogates for Neanderthals? How different was their DNA from HomoSapiens?
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994558
"Pigs grown from fetuses into which human stem cells were injected have surprised scientists by having cells in which the DNA from the two species is mixed at the most intimate level.
It is the first time such fused cells have been seen in living creatures. The discovery could have serious implications for xenotransplantation - the use of animal tissue and organs in humans - and even the origin of diseases such as HIV.
The adult pigs that had received human stem cells as fetuses were found to have pig cells, human cells and the hybrid cells in their blood and organs.
“What we found was completely unexpected. We found that the human and pig cells had totally fused in the animals’ bodies,” said Jeffrey Platt, director of the Mayo Clinic Transplantation Biology Program."
I’ve always found DC to be commercial driven (enterrainment), but never at the level of National Enquirer.
A little kick-the-dog going on here, perhaps?
Peace,
mangeorge
I hope everybody read that as “entertainment”. Sorry, my fault.
What the fuck about those kids makes you say that? Sins of the fathers?
Peace,
mangeorge
Easy there big fellah.
Sentence 1 = assertion that M.J. is other than human (levity)
Sentence 2 = conclusion relating post to the OP. No offence intended for the kids directly.
Am I the only person who read the title and had to stifle the urge to write, “But humans are animals, so ‘animal-human hybrid’ makes no sense!”?