González Thomas Marco A, Gómez-Tatay Lucía
Instituto de Ciencias de la Vida. Universidad Católica de Valencia San Vicente Mártir. Valencia. Spain.
Cuad Bioet. 2023 May-Aug;34(111):175-188. doi: 10.30444/CB.152.
Human-animal chimera research has gradually evolved to the present day, in which large projects related to the attempt to solve pathologies that help us human beings to alleviate diseases. However, it must be considered that many of these advances in science imply an important ethical dilemma in many cases, and even more so if we involve people in said experiments. In the present systematic review we sought to identify these ethical problems related to chimeras, as well as possible solutions to them proposed in the literature, including technical means for the realization of less humanized chimeras. A bibliographic search was carried out in the Pubmed, Embase and Medes databases on January 4 th, 2022. The articles that strictly comply with the objectives selected for the completion of the work will be selected. A total of 21 articles makes up our sample, from which ethical problems related to chimeras, possible solutions and technical means to avoid obtaining too humanized chimeras will be extracted. The issues identified in the articles are problems related to animal welfare, acquisition of human traits from chimeras, medical concerns derived from experimentation such as zoonoses, the origin of pluripotential cells for chimera production, the creation of human gametes by said chimeras, neurological chimerism and the moral status of chimeras. This paper provides solutions for these problems, such as the use of suicide genes in human cells that would be activated if they differentiate into neuronal cells or the use of gene editing through the CRISPR/Cas9 mechanism to incapacitate these cells so that they do not differentiate into neuronal cells. The only question that remains elusive to the proposal of solutions is the one related to the potential moral status of chimeras. It is certainly a complex issue given the variety of proposals on the concept of moral status available in literature. It is therefore necessary to bring these proposals closer to reflection on human-animal chimeras in order to initiate a discussion that can shed light on this issue.
人类-动物嵌合体研究已逐渐发展到如今的阶段，当下有许多大型项目试图解决一些病理学问题，以帮助人类减轻疾病痛苦。然而，必须认识到，科学上的许多这些进展在很多情况下都意味着一个重要的伦理困境，尤其是当我们将人类纳入此类实验时。在本系统综述中，我们试图识别与嵌合体相关的这些伦理问题，以及文献中提出的可能解决方案，包括实现低人源化嵌合体的技术手段。2022年1月4日，我们在PubMed、Embase和Medes数据库中进行了文献检索。将选取严格符合为完成本研究选定目标的文章。我们的样本共有21篇文章，将从中提取与嵌合体相关的伦理问题、可能的解决方案以及避免获得过高人源化嵌合体的技术手段。文章中确定的问题包括与动物福利相关的问题、嵌合体获得人类特征的问题、实验引发的医学问题（如人畜共患病）、用于嵌合体生产的多能细胞的来源问题、此类嵌合体产生人类配子的问题、神经嵌合现象以及嵌合体的道德地位问题。本文针对这些问题提供了一些解决方案，例如在人类细胞中使用自杀基因，如果这些细胞分化为神经细胞，自杀基因就会被激活；或者通过CRISPR/Cas9机制进行基因编辑，使这些细胞失去分化为神经细胞的能力。在解决方案的提议中，唯一仍难以捉摸的问题是与嵌合体潜在道德地位相关的问题。鉴于文献中关于道德地位概念的各种提议，这无疑是一个复杂的问题。因此，有必要将这些提议与对人类-动物嵌合体的思考联系起来，以便展开一场能够阐明这个问题的讨论。
