Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte wants to use Crispr to grow human organs in livestock.
What could go wrong?
TO THE ANCIENT GREEKS, THE CHIMERA WAS a ferocious creature—part lion, part goat, and part snake. The first chimera that Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte ever created, in 1992, was considerably less intimidating: It consisted of an embryonic mouse limb grafted onto the wing of an embryonic chicken.
Belmonte was a young scientist at the time, working in a lab in Heidelberg, Germany. He was transfixed by the mysteries of gene expression—the biological signals that govern how an animal develops—and the pure potential that lurked in embryonic cells. Take any vertebrate: a chicken, a pig, a human. At maturity, they are dramatically different organisms, but they start out nearly identical. Belmonte began to wonder: If a mouse limb could live on a chicken’s wing, what else might be possible? How else might scientists alter the signals that dictate what a creature becomes?
Belmonte’s interest in the malleability of destiny was, on some level, personal. The child of poor, barely educated parents in rural southern Spain, he had been forced to drop out of school for a few years as a young boy to support his family with farmwork. Only as a teenager did he return to the classroom—at which point he promptly set off on a rapid trajectory from philosophy (Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were favorites) to pharmacology to genetics.
This story is from the April 2019 edition of WIRED.
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This story is from the April 2019 edition of WIRED.
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