## Did you know that...

...another of the original ideas of science fiction literature – combining the cells of different types of organisms into a single embryo – has become a reality in 2021? This idea was discussed in 1986 by H.G. Wells in the novel "The Island of Doctor Moreau", in which the mad doctor Moreau uses the methods of medical science and surgery to create creatures consisting of parts of the bodies of various animals (fox-bear, mare-rhino) or even combinations of animals and people (wolf-man, leopard-man, wolf-woman). A scientific group led by Chinese experimenter Tao Tan has not yet done anything similar, but they managed to create long-tailed macaque embryos into which they implanted human stem cells. These cells were subsequently able to divide and contribute to the formation of multiple germ cell lines, typical of the developing embryo. Of course, such embryos did not develop into viable individuals, so we do not have to fear the arrival of ape-people, but the very fact that human and monkey cells can coexist in one embryo is a significant and extremely ethically controversial discovery.