Monkey business
The Edinburgh event has been followed by one more 'successful' cloning incident. Barely a week after the world said hello to Dolly, a group of scientists in Oregon, US, claimed, albeit unofficially, that from cloned embryos they have produced monkeys. Apparently, the technique used was similiar to the Scottish experiment.
However, the two rhesus monkeys born in August 1996, were cloned from cells taken from Embryos, not from an adult and, hence, are not genetically identical to any adult DNA donor. The monkeys were created through a two-step technique. First, the researchers created several monkey embryos using a standard In vitro fertilisation method - mixing eggs from a single female with sperms in a Petri dish. After the division of the embryo into eight cells, scientist Don Wolf and his colleagues at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center in Beaverton, separated the embryo cells.
In the second step, the scientists took a set of chromosomes from each embryo cell and inserted each batch into a fresh egg cell whose DNA had been removed. These successfully developed into embryos and wore implanted into separate female monkeys.
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