A team of Chinese scientists announced this Tuesday the birth of Vintage, a cloned macaque with a new strategy to get identical monkeys. The leader of the investigation, Qiang Sun, explains to EL PAÍS that the cloning of human beings would be “completely unacceptable” and assures that it is not in his plans. “We won't even think about it,” he maintains.
Sheep cloning Dolly In 1996, it caused a global alert about the possibility that some laboratory was trying to make exact copies of human beings. The technique seemed simple. British embryologist Ian Wilmut's group emptied an egg from a sheep and introduced a nucleus with DNA from an adult cell extracted from the udder of another female. Dolly It was a replica of the latter. In 1998, the first calves and mice cloned. In 1999, goats. In 2000, pigs. In 2002, rabbits. In 2005, dogs. And in 2007 the United Nations University published a report in which he stated that the cloning of human beings was, perhaps, inevitable.
Some irresponsible scientists, such as the Italian gynecologist Severino Antinori and the American biologist Panos Zavos, announced more than two decades ago the imminent birth of cloned humans, but the reality was that the Dolly —called somatic cell nuclear transfer—did not work well with primates, the animal group that includes monkeys and humans. The situation changed in 2018, when the same Qiang Sun team announced the birth of the first monkeys cloned with this strategy: two female crab-eating macaque baptized Zhong Zhong and Hua hua. The word zhonghua It means “Chinese nation.” One of the co-authors, Poo Mu-mingthen proclaimed in this newspaper: “There are no barriers to cloning primates, so human cloning is closer to becoming a reality.”
The efficiency of the 2018 experiment was extremely low. Qiang Sun and his colleagues created 109 embryos, transferred 79 of them to 21 females and only achieved six pregnancies. Only the two monkeys were born. In the new study, published this Tuesday in the magazine Nature Communications, researchers have improved the technique by adding placental precursor cells. On this occasion they created 113 embryos, transferred 11 to seven females and achieved two pregnancies and a single birth: a male rhesus macaque, which is now three and a half years old. “This new strategy has significantly improved the efficiency of monkey cloning, both with respect to the number of embryos transplanted and the number of pregnant females used,” defends Sun.
The Chinese researcher details that they have called Vintage to the animal, by the acronym for replacement of the trophectoderm, the layer of cells that gives rise to the placenta. “Vintage It is growing and getting stronger every day. “He lives in our animal facility with ample space and sunlight,” says the Chinese scientist, director of the non-human primate facility at the Center of Excellence in Brain Sciences and Intelligence Technology, in Shanghai.
This new strategy has significantly improved the efficiency of monkey cloning
Qiang Sun, Chinese scientist
The German bioengineer Angelika Schnieke, one of the creators of the sheep Dolly, reacted with concern to Qiang Sun's early experiments, which required dozens of pregnant females and mostly ended in abortions and malformed fetuses. “With these cloned primates in China, an ethical barrier has been crossed. We probably have to reconsider what is being done,” Schnieke declared to EL PAÍS in 2018. “Personally I find it difficult to justify cloning monkeys. “I am concerned that monkey cloning will continue and spread to other species,” she noted at the time.
Qiang Sun argues that the use of monkeys is “essential” in the field of biomedical and cognitive research. In 2019, his team used the technique already used with monkeys Zhong Zhong and Hua hua to create five clones from a cynomolgus macaque that had been genetically modified to mimic schizophrenia-like symptoms. Sun argues that these uniform populations of laboratory monkeys can be very useful for studying genetically based diseases, such as cancer and many brain disorders. His new study boasts of “introducing a promising strategy for cloning primates.”
Cloning is already routine in other species. The Argentine veterinarian Andres Gambini In 2010, he achieved the first cloned horses in South America. Currently, he researches at the University of Queensland (Australia) and is scientific director of Ovohorsea Spanish company based in Marbella that offers services of “cloning of dogs, cats, camels and horses, among others.”
For Gambini, the birth of Vintage It is “a notable advance” in the field. In his opinion, the fundamental idea of the study—replacing the placenta of cloned embryos with that of embryos generated by in vitro fertilization—is not conceptually new, but its success shows an alternative to improve the efficiency of cloning. The Argentine veterinarian highlights that this approach could also be used to implant embryos from an endangered wild animal in the uteruses of females of similar domestic species. In 2020, his team already managed to create cloned zebra embryos from emptied mare eggs.
Andrés Gambini emphasizes that the technique is still complex and has low efficiency rates. “Human cloning for reproductive purposes continues to be the subject of intense questioning, not only because the technique is inefficient, it entails embryonic and fetal death, and the physical and mental health of the clones is not guaranteed. What is the purpose of generating people through cloning? All the answers entail some legal, ethical or moral dilemma,” he says.
The Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights bans cloning of people and was adopted by the United Nations in 1998. Dutch jurist Bartha Knoppers, who participated in its drafting, does not believe that an
yone would dare to take the step, not even a megalomaniacal dictator. “I think that human reproductive cloning is one of the areas in which there is practically a universal consensus that we should never undertake that path,” she explained in an interview with EL PAÍS a little over a year ago. “It would create an element of industrialization in reproduction and turn people into things that can be copied. For me it is a red line.”
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