What am I a monster? Meuuuuh no, it's always better than murder!
My God that the future looks nice !!
Scientists have just cloned monkeys. And tomorrow, the human being?
Since a few hours, Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua are famous. These two little monkeys - whose images circulate everywhere - represent a scientific breakthrough: they carry the same genetic inheritance, like homozygous twins, whereas they are born with a few weeks apart in a laboratory of the institute of neurosciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai.
In other words, they are clones. And even the first primates cloned thanks to the method that made it possible to create Dolly in 1996. It was the first mammal cloned from an adult cell taken from the teats of an ewe. Since then, "twenty or so other mammalian species, including dogs, cats and pigs have been cloned, but primates have proved particularly difficult [to clone]," says Hong Kong's South China Morning Post. (SCMP). Chinese researchers describe how they did it in the January 24 Cell Science Journal.
Hope to cure genetic diseases
"According to scientists, populations of genetically identical monkeys will be useful for research on human diseases," reports BBC News. This would allow, for example, to be able to observe the impact, on one of these monkeys, of the modification of a gene linked to human pathologies, and to compare its state of health with macaques with the same genetic inheritance before the alteration of the gene in question. New Scientist details:
The idea is to accelerate the identification of genes and genetic processes that cause these diseases, to better remedy, says the Chinese team.
On the side of the Chinese press, we are delighted to see the country's scientists at the center of the world's attention. Yu Dawei, a journalist with the economic magazine Caixin, notes that "in the wide coverage [in the Chinese press] of macaque cloning, this is what holds most the comments: Westerners were the first to clone a sheep, but the cloning of a monkey, they did not do it. Could it be because they do not have the level, or is there a particular reason? he asks rhetorically. Is China now at the cutting edge of cloning? "
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https://www.courrierinternational.com/a ... tre-humain