In a break­through, Chi­nese re­searchers clone mon­keys hop­ing to pro­vide bet­ter dis­ease mod­els

Two mon­keys are mak­ing head­lines around the world. Now bare­ly two months old, they might help lead the way down the path to some of the Holy Grails of bio­med­ical re­search — at least that’s the hope of their cre­ators.

Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, the iden­ti­cal long-tailed macaques, were cre­at­ed at the Chi­nese Acad­e­my of Sci­ences In­sti­tute of Neu­ro­science in Shang­hai with the same method that gave birth to Dol­ly the sheep in 1996. Known as so­mat­ic cell nu­clear trans­fer, or SC­NT, it takes the nu­cle­us of a dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed cell from one an­i­mal and in­fus­es it in­to an emp­ty egg cell from an­oth­er. An elec­tric cur­rent trig­gers the egg to de­vel­op in­to an ear­ly em­bryo, and the re­sult­ing fe­tus, grown in a sur­ro­gate, would be a repli­ca of the an­i­mal that do­nat­ed the nu­cle­us.

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