The federal government is planning to lift a moratorium on funding for research studying the effects of injecting animal embryos with human stem cells, creating half-human half-animal hybrids. The National Institutes of Health policy would allow federal funding to go toward research creating human-animal embryos known as “chimeras.”
Carrie D. Wolinetz, NIH’s associate director for science, announced Thursday in a blog post that the agency is requesting public comment on expanding funding for such research, signaling the end of a moratorium on the experimentation. Ms. Wolinetz said development of “these types of human-animal organism … holds tremendous potential for disease modeling, drug testing, and perhaps eventual organ transplant.” I am confident that these proposed changes will enable the NIH research community to move this promising area of science forward in a responsible manner,” she wrote.