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 "a la carte" 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 state that in 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 hereditary diseases such as cancer or he Alzheimer's.

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Cloning primates is already a reality

Everyone was stunned when the success of the first cloning of a mammal, the famous Dolly the sheep, was announced back in 1996. This was a milestone and an exponential advance in the scientific field linked to genetics, and since So, attempts have been made 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 to clone a monkey in the United States, 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 they did not become viable.

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the dolly method

As 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 tissue from the fetus of a monkey. 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 so named because Zhonghua means "nation."

Mu-Ming Poo, co-author of the primate research and director of the Shanghai Institute of Neurosciences, cautions that there are no barriers to cloning primates, so it is increasingly viable to clone human beings because they share very common genetics. similar. At the same time, she has wanted to go ahead to clear up the million dollar question: will this serve to clone humans? The primary goal at the moment is to produce non-human primates for research, with no intention of extending it to people.

Polemic and controversy

A lot of people will think about how dangerous it can be to “play God”. For decades, human beings have gone beyond their imagination and the limits of science to achieve a priori milestones. impossible, going through stepping on the moon, reproducing bionic limbs and now the creation of beings seems closer and closer humans. Remember the Frankenstein film.

It turns out that the crux of the matter does not lie in the possibility or not of reproducing 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 or even cure them. The pharmaceutical industry spends huge amounts of money to produce pills that, for practical purposes, do not end the problem, but lessen its symptoms. But in many cases the drugs that are experimented on mice and are effective, in a human being do not produce any effect. The possibility of cloning at least parts of the human body could serve to give more reliability and validity to these investigations.

Final results?

Even if the result of cloning these two primates is truly successful, it is still premature to assume that from now on it will be easy to continue doing so. 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 evidence continues to show a clear deficiency in the technique. With another test that was carried out on almost 200 embryos, the results were equally poor: from 20 pregnancies only 2 specimens were born, which died 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.