Call to regulate ‘humanising’ experiments

Research that involves putting human cells or genes into animals must be regulated to avoid crossing ethical boundaries, a working group at the Academy of Medical Sciences has said.

Experiments that fall into this category are already under way, including projects to grow human liver cells in mice and engineering mice with genes for Down’s syndrome. But there is now both the “capacity and rationale” to carry out more sensitive experiments, says Martin Bobrow, a professor of medical genetics at the University of Cambridge and chairman of the group.