2021年经济学人 人猴杂交(1)（在线收听）

Experimental biology

实验生物学

Fantastic beasts and how to make them

神兽以及如何创造神兽

Researchers have created embryos from a mix of monkey cells and human ones

研究人员创造出了半人半猴的胚胎

The ancient greeks were good at inventing fantastical animals. The chimera, for instance, was "a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle". It was eventually slain by Bellerophon, with help from his flying horse.

古希腊人擅长想象神奇动物。比如，客迈拉是“一种不朽的创造物，非人类，狮头，蛇尾，羊身”。柏勒洛丰在他的飞马的助力下，最终将其杀死。

Not all chimeras are mythological. To biologists, the term describes organisms whose bodies consist of cells from two distinct lineages. In twin pregnancies, for example, one twin can occasionally absorb the other. The resulting individual is built from cells with separate genomes. A 2019 forensic-science conference discussed the case of a man who had received a bone-marrow transplant. Since bone marrow produces blood cells, subsequent DNA tests on the man's blood matched his donor's genome, not his own. (More unexpectedly, the donor's DNA also turned out to be present in swabs taken from the man's cheeks, and in his semen.)

并非所有客迈拉都是神化虚构。在生物学家口中，这个词意指那些身体由来自两个不同谱系的细胞组成的生物。例如，在双胎妊娠中，一个胎儿偶尔会把另一个“吸收”掉，最后出生的个体是由具有不同基因组的细胞组成的。2019年，一次法医科学会议讨论了一名男性接受骨髓移植的案例。由于骨髓产生血细胞，后续对这名男子的血液DNA检测显示它匹配的是供体的基因组，而不是他自身的基因组。（更出人意料的是，在他的口腔拭子和精液中也发现了供体的DNA。）

For several decades scientists have been experimenting with cross-species chimeras, organisms which, as in the Greek myths, are composites of different animals. They have created mouse-rats, sheep-goats and chicken-quails. Now, in a paper published in Cell, Tao Tan, a biologist at Kunming University of Science and Technology, and a team of American, Chinese and Spanish researchers, report efforts to extend the principle to humans. They have managed to create embryos that are part-monkey and part-human.

几十年来，科学家一直在试验创造跨物种嵌合体——和希腊神话中的神兽一样，它是不同动物的复合体。他们创造了小鼠-大鼠、绵羊-山羊以及鸡-鹌鹑嵌合体。现在，昆明理工大学的生物学家谭韬和一个由美国、中国和西班牙的研究人员组成的团队在《细胞》期刊上发表的研究尝试将这种原理扩展到人类。他们成功地创造出了部分猴子、部分人类的胚胎。

The work builds on earlier endeavours by many of the same researchers. In 2017 Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a biologist at the Salk Institute in San Diego, announced the creation of chimeric humanpig embryos. But quite how successful those efforts were is uncertain. Only about one cell in 100,000 in the embryos were human, and it was unclear whether they contributed to the organism's growth. This time things are different. The human cells seem happy to co-operate, at least some of the time, with the monkey ones.

这项研究建基于许多团队成员此前的探索之上。2017年，圣地亚哥的索尔克研究所的生物学家胡安卡洛斯伊兹皮苏亚贝尔蒙特宣布创造出了人-猪嵌合胚胎。但这些研究到底有多成功仍不确定。这些胚胎中每十万个细胞里大约有一个人类细胞，而且也不清楚它们是否对生物体的生长有贡献。这次情况有所不同。至少在某些时候，人类细胞似乎乐于和猴子细胞合作。