Chinese scientists wouldn’t do unethical or creepy experiments

Ever wonder how we get something like COVID? This. This is how you get something like COVID. It’s the frickin’ Wild West of science over there. Used to be when someone stitched two live animals together they would be sent to a psychiatric hospital. Now, put them in a lab coat, and they’re “scientists.” I’m not even sure just what they are hoping to accomplish with this nightmare fuel.

This horror will haunt your dreams

Chinese Scientists Claim to Impregnate Male Rat

A research paper submitted by two Shanghai-based scientists on June 16 described how they were allegedly able to impregnate a male rat and guide it through the delivery of ten healthy cubs.

The paper, currently in pre-publication status and not yet peer-reviewed, is entitled “A Rat Model of Pregnancy in the Male Parabiont.” China’s state-run Global Times summarized how the scientists were able to induce a male rat to give birth:

Male pregnancy is a unique phenomenon in syngnathidae, which refers to embryo or fetus incubation by males. However, whether male mammalian animals have the potential to conceive and get pregnant remains a mystery, said the paper.

First, the scientists conducted a surgery to produce a heterosexual parabiotic pair by joining a castrated male rat and a female one. After eight weeks, uterus transplantation was performed on the male parabiont. Then they transplanted blastocyst-stage embryos to the grafted uterus of the male parabiont and the native uterus of the female parabiont. Later they performed a Caesarean section on embryonic day 21.5, according to the paper.

The success rate of the entire experiment was very low at only 3.68 percent, but 10 cubs were successfully delivered from male parabionts by Caesarean section which grow to adulthood.

A “parabiont” means two organisms fused together so they share a common bloodstream. In other words, the scientists stitched a male and female rat together, kept them alive in that state for eight weeks, and then transplanted a uterus from the female to the male. Once the results of that surgery were stabilized, they moved embryos from the female’s natural uterus to the one implanted in the male.

According to the paper, this process was repeated with 163 pairs of surgically fused rats. Six of the males became pregnant and a total of ten pups were born, surviving into adulthood.

The authors of the paper, Zhang Rongia of Second Military Medical University and Liu Yuhan of Changhai Hospital, anticipated their achievement “may have a profound impact on reproductive biology.”

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported Saturday that “heated debate has erupted on the Internet in China” over the experiment. A hashtag related to the paper on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, swiftly racked up 330 million views.

Most of the feedback appears to be negative, ranging from members of the public who found the experiment horrifying to scientists who questioned the conclusions and methodology of the paper:

“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.”

Ge went on to explain that even with all of these surgical alterations, the female rat in each parabiontic pair did all of the work, including nursing the embryos until they could survive being extracted and relocated to the surgically implanted uterus in the male rat body.

So after literally torturing 326 rats, they were able to make female rats pregnant. Big “win” for science there. I hope these “science” professionals are nowhere near any of the Uyghur organ “donation” facilities.

This will probably get picked up by the trans community. Every man who wants to give birth just needs to find a woman they can graft onto his back, sync up their circulatory systems, then yank the woman’s uterus out and shove it in the man. Of course, you still need the woman to do things like nurse the child, but 3% of the time, it works every time.

Category: China, It's science!, WTF?