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from the nice-and-all-till-they-begin-to-talk-and-say-NO dept.
First monkey clones created in Chinese laboratory
Two monkeys have been cloned using the technique that produced Dolly the sheep. Identical long-tailed macaques Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua were born several weeks ago at a laboratory in China.
Scientists say populations of monkeys that are genetically identical will be useful for research into human diseases. But critics say the work raises ethical concerns by bringing the world closer to human cloning.
Qiang Sun of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience said the cloned monkeys will be useful as a model for studying diseases with a genetic basis, including some cancers, metabolic and immune disorders. "There are a lot of questions about primate biology that can be studied by having this additional model," he said.
[...] Prof Robin Lovell-Badge of The Francis Crick Institute, London, said the [somatic cell nuclear transfer] technique used to clone Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua remains "a very inefficient and hazardous procedure". "The work in this paper is not a stepping-stone to establishing methods for obtaining live born human clones," he said.
China will get the job done while 洋鬼子 twiddle their thumbs in their ivory towers.
Cloning of Macaque Monkeys by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.01.020) (DX)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by acid andy on Thursday January 25 2018, @06:12PM
Yes I agree with you. Somebody Else's Problem. They're passing the buck to the moral philosophers -- and you rarely see articles in the mainstream media about them. Rather than the critics saying that the work raises the conerns, shouldn't the critics be the ones raising the ethical concerns themselves?
Also, they're quick to talk ethics about some hypothetical future involving humans but this is classic speciesism: this stuff is already being done to other primates as per the article! Further, I'm sure those primates are much more concerned about being confined and manhandled in a sparse, fluorescent Chinese laboratory than the fact that one of the others, newly arrived, looks awfully familiar.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?