Experiment aimed at studying brain maladies

By Paul Elias

SAN FRANCISCO — Add another creation to the strange scientific menagerie where animal species are being mixed together in ever more exotic combinations.

Scientists announced Monday that they had created mice with small amounts of human brain cells in an effort to make realistic models of neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.

Led by Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in San Diego, the researchers created the mice by injecting about 100,000 human embryonic stem cells per mouse into the brains of 14-day-old rodent embryos.

Those mice were each born with about 0.1 percent of human cells in each of their heads, a trace amount that doesn’t remotely come close to “humanizing” the rodents.

“This illustrates that injecting human stem cells into mouse brains doesn’t restructure the brain,” Gage said.

Still, the work adds to the growing ethical concerns of mixing human and animal cells when it comes to stem cell and cloning research. After all, mice are 97.5 percent genetically identical to humans.

“The worry is if you humanize them too much you cross certain boundaries,” said David Magnus, director of the Stanford Medical Center for Biomedical Ethics. “But I don’t think this research comes even close to that.”