Heated debate in China over ‘pregnant male rat’ study
- Researchers at a military university say 10 pups were ‘delivered’ from embryos implanted in uteruses grafted into male rats surgically attached to females
- Study, which has not been peer reviewed, will have little impact on reproductive biology, expert says
Heated debate has erupted on the internet in China over a non-peer-reviewed scientific paper in which researchers claim to have impregnated male rats surgically attached to female ones.
A Weibo hashtag related to the study posted on the preprint server bioRxiv.org on Wednesday had been viewed more than 330 million times by Saturday, with commenters wondering if it would lead to “male mothers”.
“This is against the laws of nature. What is the significance of this kind of research?” one commenter wrote.
“The process is quite cruel. It’s like turning both the male and female rats into incubators,” another person said.
Ge Wei, chair professor of the faculty of health sciences at the University of Macau, said the claim that the researchers had created offspring in males was “totally wrong and misleading”.
In the experiments, two researchers at Naval Medical University in Shanghai first surgically joined a castrated male rat and a female rat to form a parabiont – two organisms that share one blood system.
