The Guardian, Alok Jha, science correspondent, Friday 22 July 2011
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| A laboratory mouse. Photograph: Natacha Pisarenko/AP |
Medical
research on animals that contain material from humans – such as brain cells –
should be more tightly regulated, according to a report from a leading panel of
scientists and ethicists.
The report,
which included a public consultation, says such research needs more scrutiny
and clearer legal boundaries.
Scientists
already use animals that contain human material in work to understand medical
conditions such as Down's syndrome. But the report's authors said politicians
should devise regulations to cover likely advances.
The team
highlighted future research into human cognition and reproduction as areas of
greatest concern to the public.
Martin Bobrow, professor of medical genetics at the University of Cambridge, led the
panel set up by the Academy of Medical Sciences. He said: "Where people
worry is when you get to the brain, the germ cells and the sentinel features
that help people recognise what is a person, as opposed to a rat or a rabbit.
"Things
like skin texture, facial shape, speech, replacing brain cells with human
cells, allowing the development of human germ cells in animals. And
particularly where there is any possibility of fertilisation within an
animal."
He said the
public was also concerned about animals whose appearance was deeply disturbing.
The
professor said the panel was not recommending such work be banned outright, but
that these were areas where the value of the science should be most carefully
considered. Current laws around the use of animals in scientific research would
cover most eventualities for now but these rules would not be enough for the
techniques of the future, he said.
One
"animal model" that includes human material is the Down's syndrome
mouse. It carries a copy of human chromosome 21 among its DNA. Using this model,
scientists are gaining insight into the condition.
"Changing
animals by putting human genes or cells into their structure is one way of
making them more resemble the bit of the human condition you're interested in
studying," said Bobrow.
Tom Baldwin, a philosopher at the University of York and panel member, said ethical
decisions might need to be based on the "great ape test", referring
to the UK moratorium against using humans' closest animal relatives in medical
research.
"If
you start putting very large numbers of human brain cells into primates,
suddenly you might transform primates into something that has some of the
capacities that we regard as distinctively human – speech or other ways of
being able to manipulate or relate to a human," he said. "These
possibilities, at the moment, are largely being explored in fiction but we need
to start thinking about them now."
The report
recommends that a science and ethics committee with input from the public be
set up to assess the merit of scientific projects in sensitive areas.
Lovell-Badge
said continuing public discussion about the issue was key, "so that those
sorts of experiments are discussed openly. Some of them certainly should be
done, but it needs to be done in an open way."
Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, said this sort of research required open
discussion to ensure it moved in a direction that the general public remained
comfortable with. "The Royal Society is supportive of the recommendations
made in this report, especially the call for a national expert body … Proper
scrutiny and regulation of this developing field now will ensure that society
benefits from its advances fully."
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