Word: andie
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Research Center are nothing more exotic than monkeys, one experiment performed here and reported in last week's Science had something in common with the Spielberg thriller: an animal, produced by genetic manipulation, like nothing else on Earth. Despite its utterly normal outward appearance, the Rhesus monkey known as ANDi bears an extra gene taken from, of all creatures, a jellyfish. And while so-called transgenic animals have been created before, this is the first time such a species-mixing experiment has been performed on a primate, the class of animals that includes human beings--a point driven eerily home...
...ANDi's close kinship to humans that makes this experiment at once so promising and so troubling. On one hand, the ability to manipulate the genes of a creature so similar to humans could give researchers an incredibly powerful tool for studying and perhaps someday curing human illnesses--introducing Alzheimer's genes, for example, to test new drugs and vaccines against the disease. For that reason, says Richard Weleber, a professor of ophthalmology at Oregon Health Sciences University who believes the research could help cure the form of blindness known as macular degeneration, "this is a revolutionary achievement...
...experiment also raises disturbing questions not only about animal rights but also about how far genetic manipulation can be permitted to go. If ANDi's genome has indeed been altered, he'll pass the change on to his offspring, creating an entire line of transgenic descendants. And while this so-called germline gene engineering is routinely done in lower creatures, moving it up to primates brings the technique much closer to being done in humans--a step so troubling that nobody is ready to take it. Says Tom Murray, president of the Hastings Center for Bioethics in Garrison...
Before they could try transferring a gene, the scientists had to master the technique of in vitro (that is, test-tube) fertilization, which isn't typically used with monkeys. Though the technique wasn't required to create ANDi, the Oregon team had already learned to clone the animals, which in the future will prove important since having identical copies of different monkey strains will be crucial for rigorous scientific experiments. That milestone--the first cloning of a primate by embryo splitting--was achieved by Schatten's group last year...