Posted on behalf of Kate Larkin
The British public generally accepts research on animals containing human material, if told that human health will gain from such work. But some kinds of human-animal hybrid research – particularly studies of the nervous system in primates – raise hackles. The findings come from the first UK public dialogue on attitudes to this kind of research, presented yesterday at the British Science Festival in Birmingham.
Research under scrutiny included ‘transgenic’ animals, which have human-like genetic material integrated into them, and ‘chimeric’ animals, when cells of human origin are inserted into animals or animal embryos. Medical research using animals containing human cells or human-like DNA is already well established and has been fundamental for understanding the causes and development of human diseases from heart disease to muscular dystrophy. So why was the current dialogue needed?
“This research area has grown in momentum in recent years with technology improvements and a rapidly expanding interest in stem cell research and transgenic animals. None of the research we investigated is currently illegal in the UK. But we are entering unchartered territory and we wanted to get the public response and perception to this growing area of research to avoid a future crisis," says Martin Bobrow, a medical geneticist at the University of Cambridge and chair of the working party for the report at the Academy of Medical Sciences, which commissioned the dialogue.
The exercise included group discussions and a 1,046 person national survey designed to judge the boundaries of acceptance on current and proposed research. In summary, "the public did not show overwhelming concern for the ethics of mixing animal and human genes,” says James Noble, head of qualitative methods at Ipsos MORI, the UK market research agency who conducted the survey.
48% of survey respondents thought putting human cells or DNA into living animals was acceptable; 31% thought it was unacceptable. But this broadly favourable reception was only the case when survey respondents were told that the research was done “to learn more about how the human body works and to study human health problems.” When this explanatory sentence was not included, 40% judged the practice acceptable and 37% unacceptable (an even split in attitudes, given the bounds of statistical significance).
As this result and the longer group discussions suggested, the public’s positive response was usually based on a pragmatic trade-off between the benefits of the research for human health and any concerns they had with the process.
But Bobrow points to three areas of research where the public responded with extreme caution. The first was any research involving external tissues that could modify external appearance, tailoring animals to look more humans. Next in line was the use of any human reproductive cells such as sperm or egg cells in non-humans. The third involved studies of the higher nervous system, and in particular on primate research.
So despite a growing trend for acceptance of animal testing in the past eleven years, the public attitude to human material in primates remains controversial. Even so, Bobrow says research needs to expand in this direction. “Lower primates such as Marmoset monkeys are already key model animals for neuroscience research. In fact medical research into some diseases such as Hepatitis C already relies on higher primates, such as chimpanzees, as model animals for the research,” he says.
The survey comes just days after the European Parliament agreed to new legislation enforcing stricter rules on animal testing and banning experiments on great apes including chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Despite this, Bobrow says: “Inserting whole human brains into primates is a long way off but research using higher primates containing human material is the next step and will become increasingly important for basic and preclinical research”.
Image: Mice with different melanocortin-1 receptor genes which control coat colour. MC1R is yellow (top): transgenic mouse with human MC1R restores normal colour (bottom) / Medical Research Council Human Genetics Unit