20
May
The Monkeys That Are Bred to Die
- posted at 3:24 AM
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Five rhesus monkeys were ‘created’ in a laboratory via IVF, genetically modified to be born with the agonising Huntingdon’s Disease.
Huntington’s disease is a terrible affliction, leading to physical and mental degeneration, such as jerky, uncontrollable movements and cognitive impairment. Just a few years ago, researchers were hailing a mouse model and now they’re saying that’s not good enough and they need a monkey model.
A New Scientist article explains that researchers splice human genes in and out of mice to give them diabetes, cancer, and heart disease but they’re of limited use when looking at brain diseases such as Huntington’s. Sufferers can’t control their movement, speech or swallowing, but mice engineered with the Huntington’s protein don’t jerk their muscles like humans do, so it goes a bit wrong really. The researchers can’t study the cognitive decline properly.
Anyway, back to the five monkeys. According to the Daily Mail one of the monkeys, who is now ten months old, is suffering from involuntary spasms of the hand and face (classic symptoms of the disease) but two of the others died within a day, one after a month and one isn’t showing any symptoms at all.
Whichever way you look at this, it is an appalling way to treat such amazing creatures, who have the capacity to feel so much yet languish in a laboratory, being tampered with in such an unnatural way.
How absolutely obscene and heartbreaking! The early death of the poor little ones was a mercy. How sad is that? When will this ever end? We are not a civilised people while this cruelty continues.