• Question: If you fertilise a human egg, with, for example, dog sperm, would the baby be half dog half human?

    Asked by izzy1607 to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 21 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Robert Woolfson

      Robert Woolfson answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      I’m pretty sure this is illegal. As you can imagine that’s not really something we want to be experimenting with for ethical reasons. If that goes wrong and we create something bad then whoever did the research would be in a lot of trouble.

      Even if it wasn’t illegal (I think), two species have to be very closely related to breed. So a horse and a donkey can breed because they have very similar genetics. But a horse and a cat can’t breed because they’re so different. Dog and Human DNA is so different that you wouldn’t be able to mix them together (I think).

    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      That said, you can take out the DNA from an egg and replace it with the DNA from another egg. One way people have thought about recreating dinosaurs is to replace the fertilised egg of a chicken, say, with that of a lizard. But combining DNA between different species with a sperm and an egg doesn’t work unless they’re closely related, like Rob says.

    • Photo: Matthew Pankhurst

      Matthew Pankhurst answered on 22 Jun 2013:

      Maybe in a science fiction movie! The answer is no – genetics doesn’t work that way. The thing is, a human egg and a dog sperm wouldn’t be able to “communicate” with each other, and nothing would happen., they are too different. Also, would it be called a baby? Why not a “puby” or Bappy?!
      Some closely related species can have babies – a tiger can make a cub with a lion for instance. Google “Liger” or “Tion” and see what you find.
      However (and this is the really important bit!), this tion or liger would be infertile – it cannot make sperm or eggs that work of it’s own. This is actually the proper definition of a species: “a life form that can breed with another and that those offspring can continue to breed”… If you mix the DNA up by taking it out of the human and dog cells then who knows what the result would be, but if it were a human egg and dog sperm then nope 🙂

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