Ethical Implication Of Human Cloning

NEW YORK (AP) — For the first time, researchers have used the cloning technique that produced Dolly the sheep to create healthy monkeys, bringing science an important step closer to being able to do the same with humans.

Since Dolly's birth in 1996, scientists have cloned nearly two dozen kinds of mammals, including dogs, cats, pigs, cows and polo ponies, and have also created human embryos with this method. But until now, they have been unable to make babies this way in primates, the category that includes monkeys, apes and people.

In a paper released Wednesday by the journal Cell, he and his colleagues announced that they successfully created two macaques. The female baby monkeys, about 7 and 8 weeks old, are named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua.

But he said his team has no intention of doing that. Mainstream scientists generally oppose making human babies by cloning, and Poo said society would ban it for ethical reasons.

Instead, he said, the goal is to create lots of genetically identical monkeys for use in medical research, where they would be particularly valuable because they are more like humans than other lab animals such as mice or rats.

The process is still very inefficient — it took 127 eggs to get the two babies — and so far it has succeeded only by starting with a monkey fetus. The scientists failed to produce healthy babies from an adult monkey, though they are still trying and are awaiting the outcome of some pregnancies. Dolly caused a sensation because she was the first mammal cloned from an adult.

The procedure was technically challenging. Essentially, the Chinese scientists removed the DNA-containing nucleus from monkey eggs and replaced it with DNA from the monkey fetus. These reconstituted eggs grew and divided, finally becoming an early embryo, which was then placed into female monkeys to grow to

But he doubts that's a compelling enough reason to undertake the extensive and costly effort needed to get such a procedure approved, at least for "decades and decades."

Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley, California, called it unethical to subject that new child to "the psychological and emotional risks of living under the shadow of its genetic predecessor." Human cloning could also require many women to donate eggs and to serve as surrogates, she said.

At the moment, because of safety concerns, federal regulators in the U.S. would not allow making a human baby by cloning, and international scientific groups also oppose it, said biomedical ethics expert Insoo Hyun of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals condemned the monkey-cloning experiments.

"Cloning is a horror show: a waste of lives, time and money — and the suffering that such experiments cause is unimaginable," PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo said in a