SAN FRANCISCO -- Add another creation to the strange scientific
menagerie where animal species are being mixed together in ever more
exotic combinations.

Scientists announced Monday that they had created mice with small
amounts of human brain cells in an effort to make realistic models of
neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease.

Led by Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in San Diego, the researchers
created the mice by injecting about 100,000 human embryonic stem cells
per mouse into the brains of 14-day-old rodent fetuses.

Those mice were each born with about 0.1 percent of human cells in each
of their heads, a trace amount that doesn't remotely come close to
"humanizing" the rodents.

"This illustrate that injecting human stem cells into mouse brains
doesn't restructure the brain," Gage said.

Still, the work adds to the growing ethical concerns of mixing human
and animal cells when it comes to stem cell and cloning research. After
all, mice are 97.5 percent genetically identical to humans.

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<http://www.nbc4.tv/news/5503561/detail.html>

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