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OF GREEN MONKEYS and, CHRONIC PAIN - Page 2

© Juan C. Mendible

in Portland, Oregon, of a rhesus monkey that glows when illuminated with blue light. Some of the media reported that it glows in the dark, which is plainly wrong. For you to better understand what I'm talking about, allow me to walk you through the experiments and the results.

As you might imagine, the monkey was produced through gene therapy and if you read my article on the subject you know that very little of the biology of this technology is understood. They took a gene from a species of jellyfish that when active directs the cells to make a protein that fluoresces under blue light and inserted it into rhesus monkey eggs. These transgenic eggs then underwent in vitro fertilization. Only half of the fertilized eggs, called oocytes, developed to full-fledged embryos, of which forty were selected and placed into 20 surrogate monkey moms, two per mom. From those only five produced successful pregnancies, of which there were three live births and two twin males were stillborn.

Of the live births, only one carried the exogenous gene, and... it did not glow under blue light even though there was evidence indicating that the gene had gotten into some of the monkey's cells, such as cheek, hair, urine, placenta and cord blood. That is, the gene-coded protein was not being made by the cells in which the gene was present; in molecular biology terms, it means, that it was not being expressed. The monkey, if you don't already know, was called ANDi, which stands for "inserted DNA" spelled backwards.

Interestingly enough, both stillborn males did glow. Their hair and toenails had a green glow when examined under fluorescent light. They do not know whether their deaths were due to where in the monkey's genome the gene was inserted; to the protein being expressed; to the twin pregnancy, which is very unusual in green monkeys; to the fact they used a retrovirus to insert the gene (a virus like those associated with AIDS and leukemia). Those are unreliable because they can insert their own genes into unpredictable locations, often damaging working genes and thus potentially causing disease or getting into places in the DNA where the new genes won't be expressed. That's one reason why scientists trying to make transgenic animals prefer not to use retroviruses.

The deaths could also have been caused by a combination of all or of some of those factors.

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