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Scientists have done it again. They went and did something just because they could, arguably rather than because they should. They created a chimeric monkey using stem cells and it was born with fluorescent green fingers and eyes. Totally normal science stuff.
Shocker… it happened in China, again.
According to the study published in the peer-reviewed journal Cell, the scientists created the monkey chimera using two different sets of DNA.
Why would they do such a thing?
To “benefit medical research and the conservation of endangered species,” CNN reported.
The monkey, which lived for 10 days before being euthanized, was made by combining stem cells from a cynomolgus monkey — also known as a crab-eating or long-tailed macaque, a primate used in biomedical research — with a genetically distinct embryo from the same monkey species. It’s the world’s first live birth of a primate chimera created with stem cells, the researchers said.
Wait… why was the monkey put down after just 10 days? Because its health “deteriorated with respiratory failure and hypothermia.” That’s why.
A Chimera, by the way, in Greek mythology is “a fire-breathing monster of Ancient Lycia said to combine parts from multiple animals,” so that’s where the term comes from. No big deal.
“It is encouraging that our live birth monkey chimera had a big contribution (of stem cells) to the brain, suggesting that indeed this approach should be valuable for modeling neurodegenerative diseases,” said study coauthor Miguel Esteban, principal investigator at the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences and a researcher with BGI-Research Hangzhou, a nonprofit arm of Chinese genetics firm BGI.
“Monkey chimeras also have potential enormous value for species conservation if they could be achieved between two types of nonhuman primate species, one of which is endangered,” Esteban continued. “If there is contribution of the donor cells from the endangered species to the germ line, one could envisage that through breeding animals of these species could be produced.”
Senior author Zhen Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology added in a statement, “This is a long-sought goal in the field. This research not only has implications for understanding naive pluripotency in other primates, including humans, but it also has relevant practical implications for genetic engineering and species conservation. Specifically, this work could help us to generate more precise monkey models for studying neurological diseases as well as for other biomedicine studies.”
Needless to say, there are ethical concerns with this type of research.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, human chimera research is currently not allowed in the United States. China, in the recent past, has had no such qualms.