This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 12, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown, glowing monkeys

and mice with the gene for articulate human speech.

genetically modified animals have been with us for some time now, but traits engineered in

one generation are now being passed to offspring, alarming many bioethicists.

So just what are the implications for us humans?

Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine and Cato Institute

adjunct scholar scholar comments. A team in Germany has been able to put in the human Fox P2 gene, which is a gene required

for articulate speech into mice.

And what happened is that the baby mice actually

squeaked differently than regular mice did.

So it obviously had some effect on them.

Also, some Japanese researchers recently modified some marmosets.

It's a kind of primate a monkey where they installed a gene for a protein that grows,

glows green under ultraviolet light. and what happened with that is that they were able

to breed these monkeys together and the trait was passed on. Now the significance of

that is is that it means that you might be able to genetically modify other primates so that

they too can pass on traits eventually over time.

One of the ideas is to create disease models in primates.

Right now we use a lot of mice models and so forth,

and they're not very good models for what's wrong with human beings.

So the ideas that you would be able to create primates, which

are much more closely related to humans with disease genes,

...