14 DAY TRIAL // Cloning technology has permitted scientists elsewhere to clone sheep, cats, dogs, deer and rats. Now, South Korean scientists are planning a major breakthrough: cloning a monkey.
Chang Kyu-Tae, of Korea Research Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology, said his team would launch in 2007 a project to clone a monkey by the end of 2009. "Our cloning technologies are more advanced than other countries. If we have enough funds, we will be able to clone the monkey for the first time in the world," he said.
"We should be in a hurry, as our foreign competitors are also working hard on monkey cloning to develop cures for incurable human diseases, despite ethical debate." The importance of this action resides in the fact that monkeys are closer to human biology than any other animal and would be more reliable in developing new techniques such as gene therapy or growing new organs using stem cells.
Cloned monkeys would speed up the research of therapies and medicines for human diseases, without affecting the wild populations, as many species are already endangered. "I have already been working on the mechanism of stimulating female monkey ovulation to gain many eggs for cloning," Chang said.
But for the same reason, there are ethical and legal controversies over cloning primates. "Cloning a monkey is really difficult and requires a huge amount of money. First of all, we must secure enough funds and approval from the government's National Bioethics Committee", he said.
Previously this year, the claim of Hwang Woo-Suk, a Korean researcher, that he created the first cloned human stem cells, proved fake. "Hwang's case dealt a serious blow to the country's biotech research at a time when we face tough competition with scientists in the United States and Britain," Chang said.
But Hwang's team did succeed, in 2005, in producing the world's first cloned dog, an Afghan hound named "Snuppy" (Seoul National University puppy). The first steps in cloning monkeys were made by Gerald P. Schatten, of the University of Pittsburgh, US, when in 2004 he cultivated and split early-stage embryos and implanted the pieces into surrogate mothers. "As shown in cloning dogs, we have good technology," Chang said.
Lee Byung-Chun, a veterinary professor at Seoul National University has recently cloned three female puppies for reproductive purposes using the same technique behind Snuppy.
Cloned dogs could be engineered to develop human diseases in order to be used in human disease investigation.