SEMOS - "a great leap forward for science"?

Semos the monkey

In mid-November 2007 the TV news was headed by the photograph of a sad but intelligent-looking female monkey called Semos, held at the Oregon National Primate Research Centre. The report, and those in newspapers at the same time, announced a massive scientific breakthrough, promising cures for Parkinson's Disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, motor neurone disease and all the currently undefeated and dreaded diseases of western populations. An ordinary reader would have got the message, that only through research on monkeys could such worthwhile objectives be met.

The background to all this is that teams all over the world have been trying in recent years, using many different species, to find a technique which can successfully produce clusters of stem cells (which is what an embryo is in the first few days of division) specific to one already living adult individual. Stem cells are capable of growing into, or repairing, any organ of the body if placed in position, and will not be rejected by its own immune system, and therefore have, in theory, enormous therapeutic potential. The nucleus from skin cells of the target individual is extracted and inserted in an egg from a female of the same species (that egg's own nucleus having been removed). Then instead of implantation (as in Dolly the sheep) the egg is stimulated by an electric current into division in a tissue culture and halted after two or three days, before differentiation starts.

The techniques are hugely complex and until the Oregon announcement had only been successful in frogs, sheep and mice. So the significance of the excitement in the case involving Semos is because it proves that the operation can be successful in a primate species, that much closer to doing it with humans. However, less than a week later came the press release announcing the success of a Japanese team using only human skin cells. This team used an even more advanced method which used viruses to insert new proteins into the cells which precipitated the division and growth into a cluster of stem cells without the need for a human egg.

The point for PACE readers is that the Semos experiment does not provide evidence that primate experiments are necessary if advances are to be made in human medicine. Semos and the 14 unnamed female monkey heroines who gave more than 300 eggs in the experiment, were simply exploited as objects upon which to practise an already well-understood but tricky operation.

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