Chinese scientists have successfully cloned two macaque monkeys in a groundbreaking move which could improve disease research while also throwing open the possibility of human cloning, however unlikely or illegal.
“Humans are primates. So (for) the cloning of primate species, including humans, the technical barrier is now broken,” Muming Poo, one of the supervisors of the program, told reporters in a conference call, as cited by NBC News. “The reason … we broke this barrier is to produce animal models that are useful for medicine, for human health. There is no intention to apply this method to humans.”
The team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai replicated the cloning technique that produced Dolly the sheep, which was born in 1996. Close to two dozen types of mammals including dogs, cats, pigs, and cows have been cloned using the same technique – but scientists always struggled with primates, until now.
Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, the two identical long-tailed macaques were born eight and six weeks ago, respectively, as reported in the medical journal Cell Wednesday. They were cloned using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), which involves transplanting the nucleus of a cell containing the DNA to be cloned into a hollowed out egg.
The team used a series of modulators to switch on or off specific genes that were inhibiting the embryos development. The SCNT method only worked when nuclei were transferred from fetal cells as opposed to adult ones, as was the case with Dolly the sheep.
