Human-Animal Hybrid attempts fail

Image care of djwudi from Flickr

The Associated Press reports that all attempts to create a human-animal hybrid have failed:

NEW YORK (AP) — It may be futile to try producing stem cells by putting human DNA into cow or rabbit eggs and making hybrid cloned embryos, a strategy that triggered controversy recently in Britain, a new study says. The animal eggs don’t reprogram human DNA in the right way to generate stem cells, researchers report.

“Instead of turning on the right genes, it turns out the animal eggs actually turn them off,” said senior study author Dr. Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass.

[The Associated Press] via [Slashdot]