Chinese Scientists Successfully Cloned a Monkey –– Are We Next?

Researchers with the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience have officially cloned a [really cute] pair of long-tailed macaque monkeys, Reuters news reported on Wednesday.

The scientific milestone was achieved, interestingly enough, using a decades-old technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) — a process by which the nucleus of a cell is strategically transferred to an egg from which the nucleus has previously been removed.

The result? A beautiful pair of identical twin macaque monkeys — named Hua Hua and Zhong Zhong — who were born six and eight weeks ago, respectively.

They’re not only the first primates in history to have been cloned from a non-embryonic cell, but the achievement itself represents a much more significant, scientific breakthrough, which could (but probably won’t) lead to humans being cloned in the future.

Back in 1996, University of Edinburgh researchers working with biotechnology company, PPL Therapeutics, utilized a variant of the same SCNT process to procure Dolly — the world’s first domestic sheep cloned from an embryo. And while a number of additional mammals including horses, rabbits and dogs have been cloned since Dolly’s days, what makes the inherent findings so significant is that up until this point, monkeys on the cloning block have exhibited resistance to the SCNT technique, researchers noted.

They appear to have succeeded, however, where other researchers in the past have failed, by “switching on and off genes” previously determined to be interfering with the cloned embryo’s successful development. And although the team was ultimately successful, Gizmodo was quick to note the accomplishment didn’t come without great difficulty.

For starters, it took the researchers a total of 127 eggs to produce just two baby monkeys. On top of that, they were only successful transferring nuclei from fetal cells — not from adult cells, such as the kind used to clone Dolly.

Regardless, Hua Hua and Zhong Zhong are scientific miracles in the flesh. And researchers hope their findings, published Wednesday in the journal Cell, will make it possible to study things like disease among populations of genetically uniform monkeys, for example.

Since monkeys and humans are both primates, today’s findings may also raise questions about the feasibility of cloning humans.

“Humans are primates. So (for) the cloning of primate species, including humans, the technical barrier is now broken,” Muming Poo, a leading supervisor of the inherent study, said. “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.”

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