There have been mice and cows and pigs and camels, bunnies and bantengs and ferrets and dogs, but ever since Dolly the sheep became the first cloned mammal in 1996, the list has had a conspicuous hole: primates. Now that hole has been filled.
Scientists in China reported on [January 24] in Cell that they had cloned two healthy long-tailed macaque monkeys from the cells of another macaque, using the Dolly technique. The two clones, born 51 and 49 days ago, were created from a fetus’s cells; so far, the scientists have not been able to make the tricky procedure work when they used cells from adult macaques.
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Cloning pioneers said the monkey clones represented, as Dr. Robert Lanza put it, “an impressive breakthrough, which overcomes the last major hurdle in the field.” Lanza co-led teams that cloned a gaur in 2000 and in 2014 used the Dolly technique to produce human embryos (but not pregnancies) from the cells of an adult.
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Before this, “no one was able to produce living offspring” through primate cloning, said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, of Oregon Health and Science University, who in 2013 also used the Dolly technique to create human embryos (technically, blastocysts) from the cells of an 8-month-old. (He did not use the embryos to create pregnancies either.) “These guys made it work, which is quite an achievement.”
BREAKING NEWS: meet Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, the first monkey #clones produced by somatic #cell nuclear transfer. Read the paper, now in @CellCellPress pic.twitter.com/MRA12lHmf5
— CellPressNews (@CellPressNews) January 24, 2018
Read full, original post: In a scientific first, cloned monkeys are born. Will they accelerate biomedical research?
