This monkey's part jellyfish: Transgenic
success a breakthrough
http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/20010112monkey5.asp
January 12, 2001
By Byron Spice, Science Editor, Post-Gazette
Just 3 months old, ANDi looks like any young, healthy rhesus monkey. Yet
never has there been a monkey quite like him.
ANDi -- a backward acronym for "inserted DNA"
-- is the world's first transgenic monkey -- a
monkey genetically altered to include a gene from
another species, in this case a glowing jellyfish.
Researchers in Oregon took a bit of jellyfish DNA
and slipped it into the monkey egg that eventually
became ANDi.
The jellyfish gene produces proteins that glow
green, which isn't anything that's important to a
monkey. In fact, ANDi doesn't glow, or at least not yet. What's
important is simply that the gene is there, in every cell of his body.
The advance, reported in today's edition of the journal Science, is a
first step toward genetically tailoring monkeys so that they can mimic
devastating human diseases, such as Alzheimer's, diabetes and
Parkinson's.
Transgenic lab mice have been used this way for years, but a transgenic
monkey could prove especially valuable for developing and testing
treatments because monkeys are close genetic relatives to humans.
"I think it's actually quite a big deal," said Dr. Ronald Herberman,
director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. A transgenic
monkey with human genes that promote cancers, for instance, could
provide insights that lead to new treatments and accelerate the
evaluation of those treatments.
But the humanlike characteristics that make monkeys so valuable as
disease models also raise ethical concerns. "It is hard to see what
would ever justify genetically modifying monkeys to model human
disease," said Donald Bruce, director of the Church of Scotland's
Society, Religion and Technology Project. "Most people value large
mammals and primates higher than small animals like mice and rats."
Anthony Chan, a senior scientist at the Oregon Regional Primate Research
Center at the Oregon Health Sciences Center, sees it differently. By
making monkeys that develop the same disease as humans, or perhaps
develop it faster, scientists might be able to use fewer monkeys to get
results. SNIP
Copyright © 1997-2001 PG Publishing.
--
Judith Richards, London, Ontario, Canada
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