Some would say ‘yes’ with the news today that researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai have applied the technique used to clone Dolly the sheep to create genetically identical copies of macaque monkeys. Macaque monkey clones have previously been produced by splitting an embryo, similar to the way identical twins arise in nature. The results of the latest major genetic milestone were published to Cell by a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai, with the intention of making it possible to conduct research with customisable populations of genetically uniform monkeys. The SCNT technique has worked to create about 20 different animals including frogs, mice, rabbits, pigs, cows and even dogs, but there have been "numerous attempts to clone non-human primate species, but they all failed," said Mumming Poo, an author on the paper. While these two monkeys are not the first to be cloned (some have been created using the split-embryo method which produces twins but is limited to four clones), they’re the first using the Dolly technique — single cell nuclear transfer – where cell nucleus DNA is placed in an egg cell that is then nurtured into an embryo. Using adult macaque cells as a source of nuclei, 181 embryos were implanted into 42 surrogates and again two live babies were delivered – but both died shortly after birth, possibly because of greater difficulties in reprogramming the genes. It certainly doesn’t bode well that the researchers named the monkeys Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua using halves of the Chinese word Zhonghua, which means … get ready … “Chinese people.”

Are we ready to stop those of us with enough money and power to ignore laws and ethics from continuing primate cloning and beyond?
Chinese scientists announce they have successfully cloned crab-eating macaques using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), making them the first primates to be cloned. The monkeys were named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua.