Creating monkeys to suffer puts humans on slippery slope

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

It's a comic's routine, the ultimate "by the way." Insert the stunning headline into the middle of some ordinary news and hope people don't notice. "How was your day, honey?"

"Oh fine. I walked the dog. Cleaned the house. Killed your mother. Picked up the laundry."

AOL and Time Warner finally got their merger. George W. Bush picked Elaine Chau for his labor secretary. The peace process in Israel seems to have gone belly up. The Army admitted that GIs in Korea killed civilians at the beginning of the war, and oh, yuh, by the way, scientists in Oregon have engineered the first genetically altered monkey.

ANDi, (inserted DNA spelled backward; isn't that clever?) was born in Oregon in October but not in the usual way. Man created him, not God. Jellyfish DNA was added to 224 rhesus monkey eggs then fertilized by sperm injection, then implanted in host monkeys and out of 40 transferred embryos, ANDi was the sole survivor.

The dead are the lucky ones.

Many animals have been genetically engineered since Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996. But ANDi is the first primate to be born with a gene from another animal inserted in his genetic makeup.

Because rhesus monkeys are primates closely genetically linked to man, (we share 95 percent of the same genes, according to scientists) scientists say that research on them will advance cures for deadly human genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy.

In lay terms, scientists hope to manufacture monkeys with human genetic diseases to study and experiment on them, in order to find a way to eliminate these diseases in man.

"We have learned a lot from transgenic mice, but we would like to use the monkey as a model to bridge the gap between mice and human beings . . . I think the big picture is to make a perfect human disease model," said Anthony Chan, head of the team at the Oregon Regional Primate Research center.

A perfect human disease model.

Ethicists are concerned.

"What is of interest . . . is the possibility that one could learn about certain types of diseases in ways that we really couldn't in humans," said Patricia Backlar, an ethicist at Oregon Health Sciences University. "But there's also the issue that maybe we shouldn't do this on nonhuman primates."

Maybe?

The maturation process of human beings, according to psychologists, is divided into stages. When we're young we believe the world revolves around us. "Why is the moon following me?" every child has asked. As we mature, we realize that we are not the center of the universe. That's the theory, anyway. As we age, we eventually see the big picture and view the world not as our private playpen but as our shared responsibility.

Apparently we're a country of ethical infants because it certainly isn't responsible to create a creature to suffer. The picture of ANDi that was in all the papers should move us to action. Are we indifferent because monkeys aren't house pets? If a golden retriever had been genetically engineered with the long-term goal of creating thousands of golden retrievers with, say muscular dystrophy, would we turn the page? Scientists are not engineering genetically altered primates simply to say, look what we did and to have their creations splashed on the front pages of papers all over the world. This is just the beginning. What won't ever be on the front pages are all the future animals born diseased, creatures that share 95 percent of our genetic makeup, born solely to suffer.

This is the future and it isn't right. If scientists can create sick monkeys, why not sick human beings? Colonies of them, unknown and unnamed, born for research and for spare parts.

Far-fetched? In central Russia last week, a husband and wife who ran a travel agency offering inexpensive trips to the United States were in fact murdering their clients and selling their body parts. A doctor and a university professor, they were arrested after a search of their apartment netted parts of six bodies, 60 stolen passports and $ 40,000 in U.S. currency.

We're on the slippery slide already. The National Institutes of Health is funding this research. Objections should be addressed to Director, NIH, 9000 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20892 or e-mailed to execsec1@od.nih.go.