• Question: Can you grow functional or not functional wings on a human from the stem cells of a bird?

    Asked by nicole84 to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 12 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by miniguy99, cws99.
    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      Wow, that’s a fun question! Thanks!

      I don’t think anyone has tried this and it would definitely not be allowed, but I guess it would be theoretically possible.

      Scientists have grown hearts and kidneys in labs before, so growing wings should be possible, although very difficult. You would need to know how to grow bones that are big enough, are the right shape and size and have the right strength or flexibility. Then you would need to know how to grow muscles, ligaments and tendons and know how to attach these to bones. Then you need to grow skin and feathers. Then you’d need to know how to connect it to the body and brain, so that you can control the wings. All of this would be incredibly difficult and I don’t think any scientists are able to do any one of those things properly yet, so doing all of them would be impossible now. Maybe in 20 or 30 years, that might all be possible.

      My question to you is why would you want to have non-functional wings if you could get functional ones?! :p

    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      Hi nicole84, that is definitely the most abstract question I have been asked!

      I think the answer would be no, the problem would be that the bird cells would be rejected by the human immune system so they would not be able to form wings. You could suppress the immune system of a person so they accept the stem cells, but you would have to then direct the cells to make all the different structures of the wing which would be really tough.

      A better way would be to use human stem cells, with copies of the genes needed to make wings engineered into them, this way you would have human cells making bird proteins and then you might be able to get wings formed by the cells, although as David says nobody would ever be allowed to do this!

      You would also have to choose your bird, I don’t think sparrows and albatrosses have the same genes for wings so you would need to choose wisely!

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