Animal-Human Hybrids

Animal-Human Hybrids

A mouse that can speak Hindi, a monkey with down syndrome, dogs with human hands or feet-scientists want to know if such experiments are acceptable, or if they go too far in the name of medical research. To find out, Britian’s Academy of Medical Sciences launched a study to look at the use animals containing human material in scientific research.

The research is expected to take at least a year, but the scientists hope it will establish guidelines for them on how far the public prepared to see them go in mixing human genes into animals to discover ways to fight human diseases. Professor Martin Bobrow of Mediccal Genetics of Cambridge University is leader of the 14-member research team.

It is important that we consider these questions now so that appropriate boundaries are recognized and research is able to fulfill its potential.

Using human material in animals is not new. Scientists have already created rhesus macaque monkeys that have a human form of the Huntington’s gene so they can investigate how the disease develops; and mice with livers made from human cells are being used to study the effects of new drugs.

The news, that scientists plan to put greater amounts of human genetic material into animals, is spreading quickly around the world-raising the possibility that some scientists in some places may want to push the boundaries.

“there is a whole raft of new scientific techniques that will make it not only easier but also more important to be able to do these cross-species experiments”, Professor Bobrow says.