Monkeys with human brain genes: has it crossed an ethical line?

Monkeys with human brain genes: has it crossed an ethical line? © Getty Images When it comes to gene editing, how far is too far? Chinese scientists have been pushing the boundaries, most recently by creating rhesus monkeys with a human brain gene linked to intelligence . This isn’t the first time that China’s gene-editing research has drawn criticism. In November 2018, He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen announced the birth of two babies altered with the gene-editing tool CRISPR to give them a natural resistance to HIV. In response, the Chinese government announced tighter regulations on gene editing in human subjects only three months later. In January 2019 came reports from the Institute of Neuroscience, Shanghai, of macaques cloned from a monkey lacking a gene controlling its sleep-wake cycle . With this gene disabled, the monkeys were predisposed to psychiatric disorders, and they displayed anxiety and ‘schizophrenia-like’ behaviours. Read more: Next came rhesus monkeys carrying a human gene for brain development, created by researchers at Kunming Institute of Zoology. These monkeys developed a better short-term memory than their non-altered peers, as well as showing a human-like slower brain development. Research on primates is highly regulated in the UK and Europe, and experiments on them must meet stringent welfare standards. Professor Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, believes that these standards should be used as a guide for what can be considered ethical. “I think if those standards are being side-stepped, then that’s unethical,” he says. It is not the experiments themselves that could be considered unethical, Savulescu explains, but the way the test subjects are treated. “Is it unethical to make an animal more intelligent? Not in itself,” he says. “Already mice have been genetically modified […]

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