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OF GREEN MONKEYS and, CHRONIC PAIN - Page 3

© Juan C. Mendible

According to the authors the main goal of the research was to create monkeys genetically modified to develop models for different human diseases. That is, to make knockout monkeys that, like knockout mice, have had a gene replaced with a disease gene. This would help researchers understand how those faulty genes lead to disease.

Considering the results and the goal, you probably agree with me in that the experiment was a total failure. They do not have a model, as they wanted to. They do not know why the protein was not expressed in the live monkeys or if its expression killed the others. Given the number of monkeys carrying the gene and the cost of the monkeys, the procedure is tremendously inefficient and expensive. Also: why did they use a retrovirus as a gene vector, a vehicle that besides its unreliability will be very difficult to accept by the public because of its association with the above mentioned diseases?

I learned at the late Biochemistry Department at UC, Berkeley, while working on my Ph.D., that you make sound conclusions and sound predictions only after you completely understand the science of the phenomena you are studying. Do they understand what they are doing?

According to the press, Schatten acknowledged that the work's ultimate value remains uncertain given the technical drawbacks, the high cost of working with monkeys, and the ethical issues raised by their genetic engineering. Didn't they know this when they began?

They also said they could just as easily (?) introduce, for example, an Alzheimer's gene to accelerate the development of a vaccine for that disease. And that they also hoped the technique would help them produce monkeys with breast cancer, hereditary blindness and other ailments against which new therapies or vaccines could be tested. This is interesting because no genes associated with Alzheimer's disease and hereditary blindness have been isolated, and only a small percentage of breast cancer cases are associated with the known genes: BRCA1 and BRCA2.

They also said that they did not want to make a monkey that carried a disease unless they knew there was a cure for it. Then, why do the experiment, if there is a cure already?

The research lead to the speculation that germ line genetic therapies--that is, the genetic manipulation of embryos--can be developed in which genes to fix genetic problems might be introduced directly into unfertilized human eggs of mothers known to carry certain disease genes.

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