While the controversy of GM foods has been so much in the news, the genetic engineering of animals has been comparatively ignored. It was one of the main themes of the SRT Project study "Engineering Genesis",1 in which context it was mentioned briefly in SRT's 1998 Assembly report as well as in the 1997 National Mission report on Animal and Human Cloning.2 The recent genetic engineering of a monkey in the USA has now brought to the fore some important issues about the research on animals for human benefits. The dramatic developments in cloning and embryonic human stem cells are raising another basic question of the increasingly blurred borderline between animal and human research. Research done on animals today, like cloned sheep and mouse stem cells, can rapidly become applied for use in humans. Insights from human examples feed back into animal research. In this report, we wish to examine how far we may use and modify animals for human uses, and the relationship between biotechnology in animals and in humans. By way of example, we discuss the latest developments in xenotransplantation, animal models of human disease, and cloning and stem cell technology.
The genetic engineering of animals has stimulated much public discussion, and raises a number of important questions about human intervention in animals. Despite much research, it has not found significant application in animal production for meat, milk, eggs, wool or hides. So far it seems to offer few advantages over conventional breeding and the promising field of genetic marker assisted selection. Genetic engineering in animals has primarily been in novel applications in medicine, and in particular making pharmaceuticals in the milk of farm animals, pig organs in humans, and use of mice and other animals as models of human disease.
