Clone moans?

Dr Falong Lu and his colleagues were celebrating a birthday: not a human's, but a monkey's. The animal, called ReTro, had reached the age of two and was the picture of health. This meant that Lu's team had finally succeeded in cloning a rhesus monkey. Everyone, he said, "was beaming with happiness".

Though two monkeys were cloned in China in 2017 - a pair called Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua - they belonged to a species called long-tailed macaque. Rhesus monkeys, whose physiologyThe study of how the human body works. is closer to human beings', presented an even greater challenge.  

The idea of cloning them is to help research into diseases which affect humans, such as cancer. Its advocates say that it can speed up drug testing and produce more accurate results.  

As far back as the 1950s, rhesus monkeys were used to help develop a vaccine for polioAn infectious disease that affected children all over the world. It left victims paralysed or unable to move their muscles.. Today they have an important role in the search for an HIVA virus that damages your immune system./AIDS vaccine.¹

The first animal to be cloned was a sheep called Dolly in 1996. The method used was called somatic cell nuclear transfer technique.

It involved taking the DNADeoxyribonucleic acid is the material in an organism that carries genetic information. from the nucleusWhere the DNA of a cell is stored. of a sheep's egg cell and implanting it in another egg cell whose DNA had been removed. An electric current was passed through it to create an embryoA fertilised egg that is developing into a foetus.. This was then implanted in the sheep that became Dolly's mother.

This technique has since been used to clone pigs, dogs, cats, mice, rats and cattle.

But there have been many failures along the way: it took 277 attempts to produce Dolly, and 79 to produce Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua. Mistakes are often made in reprogramming the cells, which result in miscarriages. And even among successful births, only between 1 and 3% result in healthy animals.²

This obviously involves a lot of suffering for the animals concerned: the mothers who have miscarriages, the clones who are born unhealthy and the ones which are used to study diseases.

Supporters of cloning say that this is outweighed by the benefits to humans. But Professor Robin Lovell-Page, an expert on stem cellSpecial cells which have the ability to turn into many different types of cell, such as brain cells or muscle cells. biology, has reservations:

"Having animals of the same genetic make-up will reduce a source of variation in experiments," he says.³ "But you have to ask if it is really worth it. The number of attempts they had is enormous. They have had to use many embryos and implant them into many surrogate mothers to get one live born animal.''

The RSPCA says that it has deep concerns about the cloning of ReTro:

"We are expected to assume that human patients will benefit from these experiments, but any real-life applications would be years away... PrimatesThe order of mammals that includes humans, alongside apes like chimpanzees and gorillas. are intelligent and sentientAble to perceive or feel things. animals, not just research tools."

Animal testing has a long history: there are references to it in Greek writings from the 4th Century BC. It became widespread in the 19th Century, when Louis PasteurA 19th Century French chemist known for his discoveries on vaccination and pasteurisation. used an experiment on sheep to prove that diseases are caused by germs.

But there were also many who objected to it. In 1876 Britain introduced the Cruelty to Animals Act to put limits on testing.

Does the aim justify the suffering?

Yes: Animal testing has made huge medical advances possible, such as the development of the polio vaccine. Suffering is inevitably involved, but it is better that animals should suffer than humans.

No: The aim never justifies the means. We like to think ourselves superior to animals, but we forfeit that superiority if we mistreat them. Medicine is advanced enough to do without animal testing.

Or... As in British law, it depends on the aim. If it is to combat a terrible disease, then the answer is yes. But if it is merely to test cosmetics or household cleaning products, the answer is no.