BBC Four: Why did you decide to make a film about mice rather than any other laboratory animal?
Charles Colville: There was a film already about flies, about Drosophila - the Superfly programme which went out last year on BBC Four and got a Royal Television Society award. The other great workhorse of medical science is the laboratory mouse, and if one's going to look at the great advances in medical science throughout the last hundred years, a very good way of doing so is to look at the mouse's contribution.
BBC Four: What makes the mouse particularly suited to medical research?
CC: It's a mammal and is similar in many ways to human beings. The mouse was helpful initially in identifying the inheritance of cancer. Its immune system is very like ours, so it helped to determine whether penicillin would work as a drug. We discovered during the sequencing of the genome that of the genes that mice and humans share, 99% are identical.
BBC Four: The sequencing of the mouse genome has had less publicity than the work on the human genome - do you think it is as significant in its way?
CC: Yes, I think that the programme shows that it's hugely significant because, by sequencing the mouse genome, scientists are able to work through the genes of a mouse, many of which are similar to those of a human, and see what those genes do. You can't do that in a human - you can't breed them with a specific gene in mind - while you can with a mouse.
BBC Four: In the film you look at the case of a woman with rheumatoid arthritis, and she makes a remarkable recovery. Has this treatment been fully trialled and is it available on the NHS?
CC: There are three different revolutionary new drugs, all of which are now competing for the huge market in rheumatoid arthritis, and they are all available, I understand, on the NHS. They are, however, very expensive drugs. It took many years to develop them, and I would suspect there would be a difference in allocation, depending on whether your healthcare provider can afford them.
Each of them has slightly different ways of being administered and a slightly different response in patients, so rheumatoid consultants would use them in different ways. But for up to 70% of patients they seem to have extraordinarily efficacious results, as we saw with Geraldine Williams in the programme. After 28 years of unbearable pain and suffering, her life was transformed. That's one of the incredible things about these drugs: when they work, they work really quickly. Of course, they don't work for everybody. I think that with the drug we used, 40% get full remission and another 30% experience very dramatic effects. None of them are cured; it's an auto-immune disease and doctors can't cure it. Viewers who want to know more about treatments should speak to their GP.
BBC Four: Is that the next stage for genetic research then, refining those treatments and finding out why they work for some and not others?
CC: At the moment they're identifying the genes, and you may ask, 'Why bother if you can't do anything about it?' However, you can see with the story of Leah Wilkinson in the programme that simply by identifying a gene you give the family a possibility of being screened for a condition. Dr Lucy Raymond, who has done a lot of work with people with inherited diseases, suggests that it's incredibly helpful if people know whether or not they carry the gene and it gives them some sense of control. Obviously, the next stage is working towards the therapy, and then it's up to society to decide how to use that. They're discovering genes that affect everything, from intelligence and learning to diseases like cystic fibrosis. Do we want to give doctors control over all those aspects and have completely engineered human beings, or not?
BBC Four: The tone of the documentary is extremely upbeat and focuses on breakthroughs. Did you feel that your film was a counterbalance to others that were dwelling more on the ethical dilemmas of gene therapy and animal testing?
CC: This wasn't a programme about ethical issues; this was a programme looking at great scientific breakthroughs - and that's what we concentrated on. We put the concerns about animal testing to all of the scientists and patients involved in the film. This programme is very much looking at scientific developments rather than its main focus being on the ethical issues, but I think that we do raise them strongly.
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