Researchers in China create the first healthy, cloned rhesus monkey

PRIMATES RESIST cloning. For some, that is a blessing, since it postpones the awkward day when somebody proposes cloning people. For others it is a problem. Medical researchers would find the genetic standardisation which cloning brings useful, especially if it could be applied to the two species of monkey—crab-eating and rhesus macaques—that are the mainstay of non-human-primate research. And if monkeys with clinically interesting genetic modifications could be mass-produced, it would be even better.

That sort of routine cloning is the goal of Sun Qiang, of the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute for Neuroscience, in Shanghai. In 2018 Dr Sun made headlines by bringing to term and raising two cloned crab-eating macaques. The following year, he and his group performed the same trick with five genetically engineered crab-eaters. Now, they have managed it with a (non-genetically modified) rhesus macaque. As they reported on January 16th, in Nature Communications, they have in their institute a healthy, two-year-old cloned male rhesus. And in creating him, they may have invented a better way of cloning monkeys in bulk.