BY CREATING THE FIRST GENETICALLY ALTERED PRIMATE, SCIENTISTS TAKE ONE STEP CLOSER TO ALLOWING PARENTS TO CUSTOM-ORDER THEIR CHILD'S GENETIC TRAITS
By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jan 22, 2001
He's a frisky little fellow, swinging from a ring"
He's a frisky little fellow, swinging from a ring in his doll-size white T shirt with the black belt, clambering over and through an elaborate cat-scratching post, sucking his thumb and ducking for cover when playmates Sandy and Sammy ambush him. To all appearances, ANDi (we'll explain soon) is an ordinary rhesus monkey. But appearances deceive. Born by cesarean section last October, ANDi is the first genetically altered primate ever created. If he were human, he'd be called a designer baby. And that makes him the embodiment of the greatest hopes as well as the worst nightmares here at the dawn of the age of genetics: that desirable genes will be inserted into human eggs, producing "genetically enhanced" children. Although that was not the purpose of the research that produced ANDi, the little guy with the soulful eyes is a landmark proof of concept. "At some point in the future," admits Anthony Chan of the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, who performed the manipulations that created ANDi, "it is conceivable that others may attempt this technique to enhance humans."
The researchers say they had no such goal in creating ANDi. Instead, they hope to create primate models of human diseases, and they had to start simply. They first retrieved a well-studied gene, called the green fluorescent protein gene, from jellyfish. True to its name, the gene makes a protein that, in blue light, glows green. They then put copies of the gene into viruses, since (as anyone with the flu knows) viruses are adept at penetrating cells. Each virus dutifully carried the green gene into 224 rhesus-monkey eggs, where it slipped into the monkey genes like a foreign spy hiding in a crowd. The eggs were then fertilized through microinjection of sperm. After 126 of the fertilized eggs grew and divided beyond the four-cell stage, Chan selected what looked like the 40 best embryos and transferred them into 20 surrogate-mother monkeys. Five pregnancies resulted. One set of twins miscarried. One embryo failed to implant. Three monkeys were born. Sandy and Sammy show no sign of the green gene. But ANDi does. Hence his name: short for "inserted DNA," backward.
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