Scientists Create Human Male-Female Hybrid

by Bill Fancher and Jody Brown

(AgapePress) Private researchers experimenting on human embryos have developed a being that is part male and part female.

A Chicago researcher, Dr. Norbert Gleicher of the Foundation for Reproductive Medicine, has announced the creation of "she-males," the result of injecting male cells into a female embryo. MSNBC reports that the work "provoked repulsion" when presented at a meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Madrid.

Dr. Nancy Jones, a pathologist at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and a member of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, was shocked at Gleicher's announcement -- but says she expects such experiments will continue until federal regulations are enacted prohibiting them.

"They injected male cells -- probably a stem cell line -- into the embryo and then asked where these cells went. Similar experiments have been done on animals in developmental models," Jones says.

Researchers tracked the male cells for six days before destroying the human embryo. Jones, who serves on Wake Forest's standing committee for ethics in research, says U.S. law forbids such experiments when federal funds are involved. However, no restrictions apply for private facilities conducting this kind of research.

"There are no guidelines available for the privately-funded facilities -- it's just whoever they are beholden to, if they have some sort of ethics committee. To me it clearly shows that we need more comprehensive regulation on what is and isn't ethical research on the human embryo," Jones says.

According to Jones, researchers claimed they were seeking better treatments for single-cell disorders, but that in similar experiments on animals, their efforts resulted in high death rates.

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