Cloning a complex organism, especially as complex as a primate, is not exactly easy. A lot of things can go wrong, and even the most successful cases, like the famous Dolly the Sheep, tend to involve plenty of unforeseen consequences. For this reason, no one had ever been able to clone primates, much less gene-edited ones—until now. And the results are disturbing.
Qiang Sun and Mu-ming Poo, Chinese Academy of Sciences
The breakthrough
Last year, Chinese scientists finally managed to clone two genetically identical long-tailed macaques through a similar method that produced Dolly (known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT). This involves taking an animal egg, such as an ovum, and removing its DNA-carrying nucleus. Then, a different nucleus from a different developed cell is implanted into the egg. The combination is then treated with a series of enzymes to return it to an undifferentiated state so that it can develop normally, like any fertilized egg would. And, bam! You get a clone.
As easy as it may sound, the countless technical steps and variables in the process make it very difficult to manage. In fact, there had been several attempts before to clone primates through the Dolly technique, but all of them failed. Scientists had succeeded in creating what seemed as viable eggs, but they never matured into healthy animals. That story changed in Shanghai in 2018.
Now, scientists have taken it a step farther. They cloned five more monkeys, this time with edited genes. But there are complications. The macaques inherited several disorders from the original donors.
Qiang Sun and Mu-ming Poo, Chinese Academy of Sciences
An exciting new world
So, yeah. The first-ever, cloned, gene-edited primates now walk among us, taking the whole field one step closer to both human cloning and human genetic engineering. That’s as scary as it is exciting.
On the one hand, this breakthrough capitalizes on the possibility of creating genetically uniform batches of monkeys for biomedical research. And the research opportunities are endless.
The technique serves to create living “models” with any underlying condition imaginable, which allows us to make lighting-fast medical progress by overtaking obstacles we never thought possible to overcome. You can literally engineer diseases onto test subjects. Want to explore the inner workings of Parkinson’s on several live uniform brains? No problem. Want to test the effects of cancer treatments in a perfectly controlled environment, with perfectly controlled variables? Go right ahead.
Qiang Sun and Mu-ming Poo, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Ethical worries
Exciting as this might be for the advancement of human science and medicine, it does raise several concerns. The ethical complexities of the case are multilayered, and it’s almost impossible to pick out a good solution to each of the complications we might encounter down this path. First there’s the issue of the individual macaques themselves. What’s their status now, and what rights and obligations do we have towards them?
Last year’s endearing newborns were named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, and they were the only ones to survive from a much larger badge of surrogate mothers. So far, they seem healthy enough, but we’re basically moving in uncharted territory at this point. We can’t yet predict which complications—if any—might arise, nor can we say much about the quality of life these creatures can expect.
And the story is different this time around. The five new baby macaques were born with sleep disorders, including reduced sleep time, elevated locomotive activities, increased depression and anxiety, and schizophrenic behaviors. Hardly healthy. The whole point is to use these little primates to better understand how these disorders manifest in humans—at the expense of the macaques themselves.
Ultimately, it’s simply not clear whether we should consider any of these living beings property to do with as we please, or individuals to care for.
(Science China Press released a video of the newly cloned monkeys)
There’s also the uncertainty of the ever-approaching human cloning. This breakthrough suddenly promises to make that a reality, for once you manage to clone any primate, there’s little to stand in the way of cloning any other, regardless of species. “Technically, there is no barrier to human cloning,” said Mu-Ming Poo, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience and co-author of the studies. While the Institute is not planning to extend their experiments beyond macaques, the possibility is there nonetheless, and we’re probably unprepared for the legal, medical, and ethical consequences of such a science fiction scenario.
Qiang Sun and Mu-ming Poo, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Finally, there’s the worry about animal rights and the morality of this kind of research in the first place. What rights, if any, do they have in themselves? And what right do we humans have to sacrifice other species and individuals, even if they are alive because of us, for the sake of human medicine? The fact that “we made them” seems to give us no more right to dispose of their lives and their welfare than parents have with respect to their own children. More and more we’re more concerned about how we treat nonhuman animals, and we are increasingly making companies accountable for animal abuse. The field of biomedical cloning is no different in this regard than the field of pig farming, for example.
Qiang Sun and Mu-ming Poo, Chinese Academy of Sciences
These concerns and ethical problems notwithstanding, the breakthrough is an incredible achievement and a great testimony of human ingenuity. Now that we possess this kind of power, we must tread very carefully in figuring out the best way to use it. That doesn’t mean we should not to use it at all, but perhaps we’re going too far already.
(Cover photo: Qiang Sun and Mu-ming Poo, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
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