A few weeks ago, scientists officially began a brand-new and highly controversial project. The experiment is designed to determine whether it is possible to grow human organs and tissues inside other animals using gene-editing technologies. This could be a huge step toward discovering a way to grow human tissues suitable for organ transplants and other replacement surgeries.

Currently, there is a major organ shortage, leaving thousands of patients in need without much more than hope that an organ will be found in time for them to receive life-saving treatments. In fact, every 10 minutes, a new patient is added to the national waiting list for organ transplants. And even more tragically, 22 people on that list die every day due to the inability to find a suitable organ replacement.

But what if we could fix this problem?

Well, we might just be on the path to doing so. A four-week long trail experiment concluded a few days ago, studying the injection of human cells into into a pig embryo. It was decided after the study that based on the development of the embryo, it is possible to create human-animal hybrids.

Now, before you start imagining a half man, half pig character from a horror flick, it's better to look at the intentions of the project.

Humans and pigs, surprisingly, share quite a few similarities at the cellular level. So many, in fact, that scientists at the Salk Institute wondered if it would be possible to grow fully functional human organs inside a pig blastocyst. While they didn't have the opportunity to see the experiment fully develop, watching the development over a four-week period determined that it was possible, in theory, to create fully functional human-animal hybrid.

This opens quite a few doors for scientific and medical advancements. Hypothetically, using this process, as well as CRISPR, we could engineer human organs identical to our own that could be ready almost immediately for patients in need of lungs, hearts, livers and more. In addition, recreating human organs opens dozens of new, up-close research possibilities. We could run new treatments, as well as use these organs as learning opportunities for training in the medical field.

However, these possibilities don't exist without competing ethical questions and controversy. There are many individuals, in and out of the scientific community, who do not believe it is ethical to raise animals as hosts of human organs. Others wonder if we are too close to conceiving the monsters of our modern-day existence. What do you think? Could this be a breakthrough in medical technology or too close to 'playing God'?