British scientists plan to create the world's first human stem cells from embryos that are part human and part animal, after the government's fertility watchdog approved the research.
The team at Warwick Medical School hope to use the stem cells to study fatal heart diseases, after being granted a year-long licence for the controversial work by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.
The researchers, led by Justin St John, will fuse human skin cells with empty pig eggs to create embryos that contain 99.9% human DNA and 0.1% pig DNA. Stem cells extracted from the embryos will then be treated with chemicals to destroy the pig DNA, before they are grown into human heart cells. The animal DNA is destroyed to make the cells behave more like human cells.
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