They Manage To Clone The First Monkeys With The Dolly Method
Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua have been introduced to the international community, two macaques that were born cloned with the Dolly method, the famous sheep that could be successfully cloned just over two decades ago. This has happened thanks to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the macro city of Shanghai, at a decisive moment where the debate on genetic manipulation and “on demand” is on the table. The results have been so surprising that scientists predict a profitable advance in the matter.
In addition to having exceeded initial expectations and observing the normal behavior of primates both physically and mentally, the scientists involved affirm that in the future they will be able to genetically modify these animals as a pilot test for a possible human genetic modification aimed at reducing diseases. hereditary diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer’s.
Everyone was stunned when the success of the first cloning of a mammal, the famous Dolly sheep, was announced back in 1996. This was a milestone and an exponential advance in the scientific field linked to genetics, and since then it has been has tried to work with the evolutionary branch of primates in order to demonstrate the possibility of create creatures without malformations or deficiencies To date, it has only been possible to clone mammalian species, with a total of 23 of them.
However, a few years after the Dolly phenomenon, an unsuccessful attempt was made in the United States to clone a monkey, although with a different technique. This was about emulating the division of an embryo in two to produce twins. Back in 2007, another team of American researchers cloned monkey embryos, but without them becoming viable.
As already happened with Dolly the sheep, the method used to clone these two primates has been that of nuclear transfer from a cell of a single individual, taking fibroblast from the tissue of a monkey’s fetus. These nuclei were inserted into empty eggs and, once fertilized, they were incubated by mothers until they gave birth to Zhong and Hua. They were named this way because Zhonghua means “nation.”
Mu-Ming Poo, co-author of the primate research and director of the Shanghai Institute of Neurosciences, warns that there are no barriers to cloning primates, which is why it is increasingly viable to clone human beings because they share genetics. very similar. At the same time he wanted to go ahead to answer the million-dollar question: will this be used to clone humans? The primary objective at the moment is to produce non-human primates for research, with no intention of extending it to people.
Controversy and controversy
It will come to mind for many people how dangerous “playing God” can be. For decades, human beings have been going beyond their imagination and the limits of science to achieve a priori impossible milestones, including stepping on the moon, reproducing bionic limbs, and now the creation of human beings seems ever closer. Remember the Frankenstein film.
It turns out that the crux of the issue does not lie in whether or not it is possible to reproduce humans genetically or to the taste of the consumer. The main goal is to develop new methods for investigate the causes of common diseases, prevent them or even cure them. The pharmaceutical industry spends enormous amounts of money producing pills that, for practical purposes, do not end the problem, but rather mitigate its symptoms. But in many cases, drugs that are tested in mice and are effective do not produce any effect in a human being. The possibility of cloning at least parts of the human body could serve to give more reliability and validity to these investigations.
Although the result of cloning these two primates is a real success, it is still premature to assume that from now on it will be easy to continue doing it. Of the more than 100 embryos developed and transferred with fibroblasts, only six pregnancies were achieved and only 2 of them were born generating healthy clones. Thus, the tests continue to show a clear deficiency in the technique. With another test that was carried out on almost 200 embryos, the results were equally poor: out of 20 pregnancies, only 2 specimens were born and they perished shortly after.
Other experts from the Western world, such as Lluís Montoliu, from the Higher Council for Scientific Research, believe that The use of this technique is not truly ethical due to the excess of embryos used to achieve such poor results. According to Montoliu, twenty years after Dolly, the conclusions and results remain the same.
