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A RHESUS monkey called ANDi entered the history books last week as the first
ever genetically modified primate.

While ANDi’s creators hope that GM monkeys could aid medical research, the
announcement has led to heightened fears that humans could be next. “This could
lead to a new form of eugenics, where we start designing our children according
to our whims,” claims Dave King of the Campaign Against Human Genetic
Engineering in London.

But scientists say that the difficulties involved in creating ANDi show how
far away we are from engineering humans. “To do this in humans would be mad,”
says Martin Bobrow, a medical geneticist at the Cambridge Institute for Medical
Research. “You couldn’t imagine trying to implant so many [human embryos] with
such a low success rate,” he says.

ANDi—whose name is iDNA (inserted DNA) spelled backwards—was
created by Gerald Schatten and his colleagues at the Oregon Regional Primate
Research Center in Portland. Schatten’s team used a virus to insert a jellyfish
gene for fluorescence into 224 unfertilised monkey eggs.

Fertilising the eggs yielded just 40 viable embryos. From these, five
pregnancies resulted. Of the three monkeys born live, tests showed that only
ANDi carries the gene—but it is not being expressed. Unlike humans given
gene therapy, ANDi should pass the gene on to any descendants.

Donald Bruce, director of the Society, Religion and Technology Project of the
Church of Scotland, thinks that ANDi is a case of science going too far, given
monkeys’ closeness to humans. “Things go wrong all the time with these things,
so in humans it would be absolute folly,” he says.

Patrick Bateson, chair of a Royal Society working party on GM animals,
rejects the notion that humans are next. “There’s no clear reason to suppose
that monkeys will provide the bridge between mice and men.”

Another deterrent to altering humans, he says, is that genetic engineers
cannot yet insert a gene into a precise place in the genome. Genes added in the
wrong place can disrupt key genes and create havoc.

Bateson also queries the value of GM monkeys for research. “They’re not
sensible animals to use, because they develop slowly and are difficult to keep,”
he says. But other researchers think they could be useful. “GM monkeys would be
better models than mice for some purposes,” says Martin Evans of Cardiff
University, who has created GM mice to study cystic fibrosis. “But it would be
far more ethically objectionable.”

In any case, most researchers cannot afford to use monkeys. It costs about
£3000 to buy a monkey, compared with £1 for a mouse.