Question: Has anyone ever spliced two animals together?

Lilian Hunt answered on 10 Mar 2014:

It depends exactly what you mean by ‘splicing’ so I’ll try and cover the options.

Naturally in the world there are some cases where two different species of animal have had offspring that is a mixture of the two types of animals. Most of these animals are pretty similar to start with: a donkey and a horse can create a mule, a male lion and a female tiger can parent a liger, a grizzly bear and a polar bear can have a grolar bear and a zebra and a horse can have a zorse to name a few examples… These hybrids can’t have any offspring themselves and can suffer from medical problems or have odd features (ligers and tigons are a lot larger than their parent tigers and lions for example).

In scientific research there are some examples of animals called ‘chimeras’. It’s a single animal but it’s cells have 2 distinct sets of genetics. Basically some cells are from one animal, and the rest are from another. In 1984 a ‘geep’ was made by combining goat and sheep embryos and the animal survived to adulthood and allowed us to understand more about how the immune system works. Potentially it is now possible to combine some human and animals aspects, such as sheep in America that have been created to contain some human blood and some animal blood. However this has raised a lot of ethical concerns.

I can’t say I know of any scientists that have created Frankenstein creature by stitching together parts of animals so I think I can skip that option here…! But the most common form of splicing is taking genes from one animal (or human) and fusing it to some sort of gene that will cause a colour change in cells and popping it into some bacteria. Suddenly we have 3 different organism’s DNA in a single bacteria cell but we can learn so much about how that gene works from it. A lot less scary then the ideas in movies like ‘The Fly’ and ‘Splice’ !