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First cloned non-human primates; Serious monkey business
Topic Started: Jan 24 2018, 08:55 PM (334 Views)
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https://www.google.com/amp/www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/01/24/first-monkeys-cloned-historic-breakthrough-could-humans-next/amp/
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Yiqi15
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I knew as soon as I saw it people would start debating the ethics. Can we just just put that aside?
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Obligatory paper link. Anyway, from the article:

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The researchers said they were hoping it would allow the creation of an army of genetically uniform monkeys which could be used in labs to improve research.

This seems worrying to me. I don't keep up with this sort of research, but what kind of experiments are being implied here? I'm worried they hold clones to some lower ethical standard (I've seen views such as these touted even here on the forum before) which is completely insane.

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Although the technique worked when using cells from a monkey foetus, scientists found that when they attempted the same process using adult cells, the baby monkeys only lived for a few hours after birth. And out of 79 attempts, only two babies were born.

This process is still extremely problematic, evidently, and needs a lot of work. It brings up a big moral conundrum. It's currently a very questionable activity:

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“Cloning these monkeys involved many failed attempts, which causes enormous suffering to the animals involved,” said Dr Helen Wallace, Director of GeneWatch UK.

"Given the serious problems with this technique, we question whether it is ethical to be creating monkey clones."

Dr Julia Baines, Science Policy Adviser at PETA UK added: "Cloning is a horror show: a waste of lives, time, and money – and the suffering that such experiments cause is unimaginable.

"Because cloning has a failure rate of at least 90 per cent, these two monkeys represent misery and death on an enormous scale. This experiment – and all other experiments on animals – should be ended immediately."

But with more testing, it's possible cloning can become much safer in the long-term, which has huge benefits... but this involves a lot more suffering in the short term.

Yiqi15
 
I knew as soon as I saw it people would start debating the ethics. Can we just just put that aside?

No, absolutely not. I'm someone who very much pushes for innovation and technological progress as a top priority for humans as a whole, but we can't just shove the problems of it under the rug and hurt people and animals to get where we want to be.
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LittleLazyLass
Jan 24 2018, 09:39 PM

Quote:
 
The researchers said they were hoping it would allow the creation of an army of genetically uniform monkeys which could be used in labs to improve research.

This seems worrying to me. I don't keep up with this sort of research, but what kind of experiments are being implied here? I'm worried they hold clones to some lower ethical standard (I've seen views such as these touted even here on the forum before) which is completely insane.

I'm pretty sure the focus here in on the genetically indentical aspect, ie, letting experiments be played out with less confounding factors. This ties in with a problem with how the article is framing the controversy, I think. Non-human primates are already widely used in labs and and the fact that this experiment involves cloning doesn't make it even more harmful. Whether or not you support testing on NHPs, this cloning is a rather unremarkable part of a much larger issue.

Also, I just want to say I like how Tet's title implies humans have been cloned already. :P
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The title implies human primates have been cloned.
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again animal experimentation is very regulated (europe at least) and monkeys are like the last option.
and I don't see with monkey clones are less worthy than "normal" ones, a lot of the animals that are used in labs are lab breeds or GM organisms and afaik they have the same rules as normal ones, though I honestly understand both sides on the animal experimentation thing.
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lamna
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Just to cover this, clones are not used in research because they are "lesser". Indeed the opposite is more accurate, clones are more valuable.

If you are testing a drugs or procedure, having genetically identical animals can help create more repeatable tests. If you're using unrelated individuals, there is always a chance that some are always going to be weaker or stronger than others.

But this does come at a financial cost. Cloning animals has a massive failure rate, almost all cloned embryos do not survive to become healthy adult animals.

Even if we imagine a future world in which cloning is much more successful, it's never going to be cheaper than simply breeding more animals.
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LittleLazyLass
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Quote:
 
Just to cover this, clones are not used in research because they are "lesser". Indeed the opposite is more accurate, clones are more valuable.

If you are testing a drugs or procedure, having genetically identical animals can help create more repeatable tests.

I know that, I was just worried they might also be held to some lower ethical standard. Like I said, I know very little about this kind of research, so I didn't know whether monkey testing was still a thing or not normally.
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lamna
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It's very much still a thing, and likely to remain important long into the future.

Great apes are fantastic for testing as they are so similar to humans, but they are also take up a lot of space, breed slowly, and perfectly capable of killing people. Add that to the ethical issues (New Zealand and most of Western Europe has banned testing on them) and they are hard to use and are likely to be phased out in the coming decades.

Rodents are small, easy to handle, the breed rapidly and their are less ethical concerns with keeping them in laboratory conditions. However, they are pretty distinct from humans.

Monkeys provide a useful intermediate. They are smaller, less dangerous and not as intelligent, but are still closely related to humans.

You have to keep in mind, nobody actually wants to do animal testing. It's got horrible publicity, it's expensive and messy, and nobody enjoys causing animals to suffer.

More alternatives are being developed all the time, and eventually, they'll be more accurate and cheaper than using animals.

In truth, I doubt that we'll figure out how to do cloning properly before animal testing is obsolete.
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