BEIJING — Scientists have created the world’s first human-sheep chimera — which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs, according to news report Monday. The sheep have 15 percent human cells and 85 percent animal cells and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer. Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and about 9.8 million dollars perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep’s foetus. He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep. The process would involve extracting stem cells from the donor’s bone marrow and injecting them into the peritoneum of a sheep’s foetus. When the lamb is born, two months later, it would have a liver, heart, lungs and brain that are partly human and available for transplant. At present 7,168 patients are waiting for an organ transplant in Britain alone, and two thirds of them are expected to die before an […]