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As animal rights activists point out ad nauseum, animal models are not completely analogous to human beings. Substances which cause cancer in rats sometime fail to cause cancer in human beings and vice versa. But what if researchers genetically engineered mice and rats to suffer from the same illnesses human beings suffer from? Well now they can, which is creating an enormous debate about the ethics of such animal research.
Until recently, scientists relied on finding mutant strains of mice which suffered from diseases or symptoms similar to those experienced by human beings. Mice commonly used to test cancer treatments, for example, are specially bred to be highly prone to developing cancer.
Advances in biotechnology take that one step further and allow scientists to alter the genes in mice embryos so they are born with specific defects such as cystic fibrosis or arthritis. As National Institutes of Health immunologist Ronald Schwartz recently told the Washington Post, such animal models should be incredibly powerful.
John Sharp, superintendent of induced mutant resource at the Jackson Laboratory, put it bluntly. "More and more research is moving toward the use of these mice. It’s where the future of research is headed."
And it is not just mice. Researchers at laboratories around the world are genetically altering pigs, goats and sheep to do everything from produce more easily transplantable organs to providing delivery mechanisms for medicine in their milk.
As genetic engineering of animals spreads, so does the opposition movements aimed at limiting or banning it. Those opposed to such genetic engineering complain it is wrong to design animals to suffer.
"There really is something primordially horrible about replicating animals that will suffer endlessly," |Bernard Rollin|, a Colorado State University physiologist, told the Washington Post. Other attack genetic engineering as challenging our notions of life as inherently sacred.
The biggest opposition in recent years came in Switzerland, where 112,000 Swiss citizens signed a petition to put a ban on research on genetically altered animals on the ballot.
Failing to use these genetically engineered animals, however, will mean ignoring an excellent source of medical information. Genetically engineered mice have already yielded important information about deadly human illnesses such as |Huntington's| disease. When scientists removed a gene in mice which corresponds to the defective human gene that causes Huntington’s, researchers noticed small protein deposits in the brains of the mice; something that had not been observed in Huntington’s patients. Upon reexamining the brains of Huntington’s victims, however, researchers indeed found the protein deposits, which are now suspected as one of the primary causes of the diseases' symptoms.
Source:
Rick Weiss, "Creation of flawed animals raises new ethics issues," Washington Post, June 7, 1998.