Primate cloned
Updated on 14 November 2007
First came Dolly the sheep, then cloned cows, pigs and even a pet cat. But never, until now, a primate.
Today it was announced that scientists in America have successfully managed to clone the embryo of a macaque monkey. It's being hailed as a major advance in this controversial field and a crucial step in efforts clone human embryos more effectively.
This is not about making little 'you's and 'me's. This is about finding successful treatments for Parkinson's, motor neurone disease, and cystic fibrosis.
For the first time, scientists in America have successfully cloned the embryo of a primate - a 10-year-old male macaque monkey - and been able to extract stem cells. It means human therapeutic cloning and stem cell treatments are on the horizon while also raising the technical possibility of creating cloned human embryos.
The successful experiment used the "Dolly the Sheep" method of transferring DNA from an adult cell.
Semos, a 10-year old male macaque, is the first primate to be therapeutically cloned, which is how Dolly the sheep arrived in this world.
It's a breakthrough because humans are primates too.
First, the nucleus of an egg cell from a female monkey was removed and replaced by the nucleus from one of Semos' skin cells.
After a sharp electric shock, the cells divided to form a very early embryo, genetically identical to Semos.
It's a breakthrough because humans are primates too.
And from that embryo, the team were able to extract stem cells that have the potential to grow into any of his body cells - from heart to liver to skin.
And it's that that makes this so important. Until now, cloning primates this way had proved to be very difficult, but this opens the way to eventually doing it in humans and realising the medical dream of treating a wide range of human diseases with personalised genetically matched cells that won't be rejected by the body's immune system.
Their success was still not easy. From 304 eggs from 14 monkeys, they ended up with just two stem cell lines.
In this case, the journal Nature took the unusual step of asking another lab to repeat the experiment before it was made public.
That was because this man, the Korean Woo Suk Hwang, had claimed in February 2004 that he had cloned cells from a human being.
His exposure as a fraud led to his disgrace and rocked the scientific community.
