Humans may have taken a step closer towards cloning homo sapiens. On July 5, 1996, humans created Dolly the sheep, which was the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell. Since Dolly, scientists have cloned nearly two dozen kinds of mammals, including dogs, cats, pigs, cows, and ponies. Now, scientists have made a tremendous breakthrough; for the first time ever humans have cloned a primate.
Two healthy monkeys were created in a lab and now it begs the question: “Is the next step cloning humans?”Two identical long-tailed macaques were born eight and six weeks ago at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience in China. However, there were several speed bumps along the way to creating the cloned monkeys. The process took 127 eggs and a total of 79 different transfer attempts to engineer the healthy cloned primates. The monkeys named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua are the first to be produced using the single cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) process, which involves “transferring cell nucleus DNA to a donated egg cell that is then prompted to develop into an embryo, and is the same process used for Dolly the sheep.”
