From animals in the service of nutrition...to the potential of biotechnology

Abstract

In 1986, in her paper, ‘Animals in the service of human nutrition’, celebrating the award of the E. V. McCollum International Lectureship in Nutrition, Dr Elsie Widdowson observed: ‘Animals have served human nutrition well over the past century.... They are still of great service in human nutrition and may be more essential in the future as proper animal models for human diseases are discovered’. Ten years on, those animal models are an integral part of nutrition research and are providing fundamental tools to study the effects of diet on many of the major diseases of the Western world, including cardiovascular disease, obesity and cancer. Many of these models have been developed through the use of recombinant DNA technology and the expression of normal or mutated genes in the genome of transgenic mice.