SHARON BEGLEY: ‘Scientists in China reported… that they had cloned two healthy long-tailed macaque monkeys from the cells of another macaque, using the Dolly technique… The cloning team said its breakthrough might one day be used to produce genetically identical monkeys for biomedical research. Most of the lab animals used to study diseases, from cancer to Alzheimer’s, are highly inbred mice. But mice don’t get every human disease or don’t get it the way people do…
If monkey clones can be created routinely, they can also be genetically altered, one gene at a time, with techniques such as CRISPR. “You can produce cloned monkeys with the same genetic background except the gene you manipulated,” senior scientist Qiang Sun told reporters. “This will generate real models not just for genetically based brain diseases, but also cancer, immune, or metabolic disorders”.’ SOURCE…
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