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Ten years ago next month, the public was introduced to the first genetically
engineered animal. In the journal Nature, American scientists put on show
a mouse twice the size of its litter mates because it carried a rat’s growth
hormone gene. Today, transgenic animals have become standard tools in biomedical
research; last year, at least 62 000 transgenic laboratory animals were
produced in Britain alone.

Controversy, however, continues to surround the genetic modification
of living organisms, especially animals, and opposition may be gathering
momentum. Late last month for example, Jeremy Rifkin, America’s most outspoken
opponent of biotechnology, launched a campaign in Britain to stop industry
producing genetically engineered food. A ground swell of concern, he said,
is about to make this ‘the first technology publicly debated before it comes
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Rifkin was speaking in London at a conference organised by the animal
welfare charity, the Athene Trust. For once, scientists, civil servants
and biotechnology entrepreneurs shared the platform with environmentalists,
food campaigners and antivivisectionists. To Kevin Ward, a producer of transgenic
sheep in Australia, genetic engineering is ‘one of the most important
tools to save our civilisation as we currently know it’. To Rifkin, it threatens
to ‘reduce the whole living planet to commercial property and destroy the
spirit and soul of a generation’.

A new coalition has sprung up around genetically engineered food, with
consumer groups, environmental activists, and animal welfare and rights
groups uniting forces. Rifkin, a veteran campaigner, said: ‘The politics
of food will be the entry point into a new age of biological consciousness.’

For Sue Mayer, director of science for Greenpeace UK, the issue is part
of a wider debate over ‘genetic pollution’ – the unpredictable spread of
DNA from genetically modified organisms with the potential to destroy the
barriers between species. ‘Do we need a technology that undermines the integrity
of nature? We haven’t had that debate,’ she said. Joyce D’Silva, director
of the Athene Trust, pointed out that traditional selective breeding had
already given us crippled broiler chickens, and bulls that cannot mate
because of their shape. Genetic engineering is unlikely to improve the welfare
of intensively farmed animals, she argued. Malcolm Eames of the British
Union for the Abolition of Vivisection called for public discussion of ‘the
directions of policy and research’.

To date, livestock breeders have used genetic engineering in attempts
to enhance the productivity of pigs, cattle, sheep, chickens and farmed
fish. For instance, Ward and his colleagues at Australia’s largest research
organisation, the CSIRO, are trying to make sheep produce more wool. The
keratin protein of wool is largely made of a single amino acid, cysteine,
and earlier experiments showed that if you can get more of it into a sheep,
the animal makes more wool. Ward and his team injected the fertilised eggs
of sheep with genes for enzymes that generate cysteine and now have three-month-old
transgenic lambs. Ward hopes these sheep will be much woollier than their
fellows and enable farmers to make the same profit with half as many of
sheep.

The Australian researchers are also working to produce sheep that are
resistant to attack by blowfly larvae, which burrow into a sheep’s skin
and can create wounds that leave the animal open to infection. Ward has
focused on chitinase, an enzyme found in tobacco, cucumber and other plants,
that attacks the cuticle of insect larvae. Giving sheep a gene for chitinase
may kill the larvae and remove the need to use pesticides. He sees no risk
to human health, should such sheep be eaten: ‘Chitinase is already in your
salad.’ In a pilot study, his team is trying to create mice that produce
chitinase in their sweat glands (Technology, 4 April).

‘KNOCKOUT MICE’

Most farmers support the research, Ward says. But the researchers have
still to reckon with Rifkin and his pressure group, based in Washington
DC, the Foundation on Economic Trends. The genetic manipulation of livestock
‘will be the greatest financial disaster in the history of food technology,’
Rifkin predicted. Launching his Pure Food Campaign last week, Rifkin said:
‘We are determined that genetically engineered food will not reach the market.’
Some 1500 top chefs in the US have agreed to display the campaign’s logo,
bearing the words ‘We do not serve genetically engineered foods’, on their
menus. Within a year, the logos will be all over Europe, Rifkin said. He
is also pushing for strict labelling regulations: ‘If food producers are
so proud of these Brave New World products, why are they so afraid to label
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The arrival of genetic engineers on the farm could also compromise the
welfare of livestock argued Robin Attfield, a philosopher at the Centre
for Applied Ethics at the University of Wales, Cardiff, if they create animals
with physical or mental deficiencies which make them easier to farm. It
is now possible to add or subtract genes at will, for example, to produce
‘knockout’ mice which lack a specific gene.

One of the latest products of this technique is a mouse that has problems
remembering where it is, thanks to the targeted destruction of a single
gene (Science, 10 July, p 201). The creature, developed by Susumu Tonegawa
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was hailed as a major breakthrough
in the study of learning and memory, but it also raises moral questions.

According to John Webster, professor of animal husbandry at the University
of Bristol, genetic engineers could strive to create animals that suffer
less in cages or confined pens, because their ability to learn, remember
and perceive their environment has been genetically impaired. But changes
of this type, he said, lead to an ethical minefield. ‘If you could create
a sheep with the cognitive capacities of a prawn, would it be a bad thing?’
The idea of reducing an animal’s abilities to perceive and respond to its
environment ‘terrifies me too’, he said. ‘Trying to apply scientific criteria
to that causes my mind to come crashing up against the buffers.’

BIOREACTORS

Farm animals bearing foreign genes can also act as ‘bioreactors’ to
produce human medicines cheaply. The Edinburgh company Pharmaceutical Proteins
has produced transgenic sheep that secrete into their milk a human protein,
a1-antitrypsin. This substance may prove to be an effective treatment for
the lung disease emphysema, but large amounts are needed by every patient
(Technology, 19 October 1991). ‘It could not be made by any existing technology
in the quantity and the price needed to treat people,’ says Ron James, managing
director of Pharmaceutical Proteins.

Not everyone, however, sees advances of this type as unequivocally good.
For instance, Eames of the BUAV said some other companies do not make clear
what animals have had to endure in the development of such creatures. They
publish only their successes, not their failures, ‘making it difficult to
know what’s going on, and to raise the debate’, he said.

Webster suggested that the commercial application of genetic engineering
should be subjected to the 1986 Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act, which
controls what scientists can do to laboratory animals in Britain. The act
goes a great deal further in safeguarding creatures from abuse than anything
achieved for farm animals, he said. Extending the law to farm animals would
‘ask whether the ends justify the means, and protect animals from unnecessary
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Away from the farm, genetic engineering is also fuelling debate in the
laboratory. Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs doing basic research use knockout techniques to explore
the function of a particular gene, altering an animal’s DNA to see what
happens. In applied research, the goal is often to produce a mouse or rat
with a genetic defect that models a human disease, so that the animal can
be used to test possible treatments. Three groups recently announced the
birth of a knockout mouse that develops cystic fibrosis (This Week, 19 September).

It is considered unethical to test experimental drugs on humans, and
transgenic animal models ‘are really necessary to the development of clinical
therapies’, said Elaine Dzierzak, a geneticist at the Medical Research Council’s
National Institute for Medical Research, in London.

But Gill Langley, scientific adviser to the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane
Research, argued that these animal models are often flawed, ‘because the
same genetic defect does not yield a comparable illness’. She cited the
fact that pancreas malfunction is suffered by 85 per cent of people with
cystic fibrosis, whereas mice rarely display the problem. Moreover, ‘the
potential for harm to animals is huge’, Langley said, because of the unforeseen
consequences of the genetic manipulations. The infamous ‘Beltsville’ pigs,
for example, engineered by agricultural scientists in the US to carry human
growth hormone genes, suffered from severe arthritis and could not stand.

Officialdom has not been oblivious to public disquiet. Derek Burke,
chairman of the government’s advisory committee on novel foods and processes,
said his committee alerted the agriculture minister ‘to wider concern’ about
genetically engineered food. The result was the creation of an ‘independent
expert group’, which will report to the minister next year. It is to investigate
how religious, vegetarian and other groups would react to modifications
such as a crop which contained an animal gene. However, this narrow brief
means broader ethical issues raised by the technology will not be considered.

The European Commission has also set up a committee of six people, including
Mary Warnock, who chaired the British government’s investigation into the
ethics of embryo research. This group, according to Maurice Lex, scientific
officer at the Commission, will concentrate on the ethical aspects of biotechnology,
‘with a view to improving public understanding and acceptance of it.’

Patenting of genetically modified organisms remains contentious too.
In 1988, the US Patent Office granted Harvard University the first patent
on a transgenic vertebrate, the onco-mouse, which develops cancer a few
weeks after birth. The European Patent Office eventually followed suit,
but challenges are expected to be made before February when the decision
will otherwise become absolute. Opponents to patenting ‘life’ argue that
the European Patent Convention disqualifies ‘types of animals’ from being
patented, along with inventions that are contrary to public morality. They
also argue that patent examiners should not make moral decisions.

Peter Stevenson, educational director of the Athene Trust, backed the
argument that no patents should be granted on animals until all the issues
are debated. He also echoed the views of others when he said that, in Europe,
efforts in biotechnology were aimed mainly at benefiting industry, with
little thought for animal welfare. Meredith Lloyd-Evans, principal consultant
to Biobridge, a ‘bio-business development consultancy’ in Cambridge, said
a ban on patenting geneti-cally engineered animals would ‘irreparably damage
intellectual freedom and technological development’. He agreed, however,
that tougher legislation to protect animal welfare, was ‘in the industry’s
own interest’.

At the London meeting, the divide between scientists and nonscientists
often seemed huge. One researcher presented the creation of animal models
of disease using slides illustrated with cartoons of mice opening champagne
bottles and dancing hand in hand. Another scientist proudly showed a photograph
of a cow with a rumen fistula – an opening into the animal’s stomach, made
for researchers to study digestion – apparently oblivious to the uncomfortable
reactions in the audience. ‘These scientists,’ said Webster, ‘have no idea
about the beliefs and feelings of the people they’re talking to.’