Human Cloning Isn’t Monkey Business
By Osagie K. Obasogie,
Genetic Crossroads
| 11. 29. 2007
Rarely have science, politics, and international diplomacy converged as intensely as they have over the past few days.
Researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center have accomplished what some scientists equate with breaking the sound barrier: creating cloned embryos from an adult monkey and isolating its stem cells. Since monkeys are humans' closest relatives and embryonic stem cells might treat devastating injuries and diseases, this research has invigorated prospects for developing patient-specific embryonic stem cells for humans by copying the Oregon researchers' new approach. After all, monkey see, monkey do.
Yet another level of intrigue comes from the fact that cloning an embryo to obtain stem cells involves the same underlying process as cloning an embryo to create a living, breathing clone: taking the nucleus from a body cell, sticking it into an egg, and triggering its early development. Research cloning involves stopping this development after a few days to cull the early embryos' stem cells; reproductive cloning entails placing the developing embryo into a surrogate until the clone is born.
Scientists have not yet created a living cloned...
Related Articles
By David Coltman, Carson Mitchell, Liam Alastair Wayde Carter, and Tommy Galfano, The Conversation | 05.12.2025
Gray wolf by Jessica Eirich via Unsplash
“I’m not a scarcity guy, I’m an abundance guy”
– Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm, The New Yorker, 4/14/25
Even the most casual consumers of news will have seen the run of recent headlines featuring the company Colossal Biosciences. On March 4, they announced with great fanfare the world’s first-ever woolly mice, as a first step toward creating a woolly mammoth. Then they topped that on April 7 by unveiling one...
Riquet Mammoth Kakao (c.1920)
by Ludwig Hohlwein, Public Domain via Flickr
Colossal, the de-extinction company, scored headlines (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) recently by announcing that they had created mice! Not just any mice, not even colossal mice, but genetically engineered, normal-size “woolly mice” that are the result of editing seven genes in mouse embryos. This Colossal presented as an important step toward making a specimen of charismatic megafauna – a...
By Ben Johnson, Nature | 02.14.2025
A London-based biotech has amassed the world’s largest ethically sourced foundational biodiversity database for training artificial intelligence (AI) by setting up partnerships with 25 countries around the world. The startup, Basecamp Research, announced in January the launch of a new...
