In Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s “Frankenstein” Dr. Viktor Frankenstein creates a living man out of various bits of corpses. While scientists in China worked with monkey embryos rather than human parts, some have dubbed the monkey they created a “Frankenstein” type project.
According to a study about the breakthrough published Thursday, this research may “have major implications for the study of primate naive pluripotency and genetic engineering of non-human primates.”
As described in the publication, researchers “systematically tested various culture conditions for establishing monkey naive embryonic stem cells and optimized the procedures for chimeric embryo culture,” using material from the cynomolgus monkey, also known as a crab-eating or long-tailed macaque.
Per CNN, that means that the monkey – which lived for 10 days before being euthanized – had two sets of DNA. Metro UK described the process as an embryo being injected with genetically distinct cells. This is why it is considered a “chimera” after they hybrid creature from Greek mythology.
“Poor chimerism has been achieved in other [non-rodent] species including non-human primates due to the inability of the donor cells to match the developmental state of the host embryos,” said the study authors.
Metro UK also said the monkey had “glowing” green eyes and fingers.
“It’s the world’s first live birth of a primate chimera created with stem cells, the researchers said,” according to CNN. In addition to the liveborn chimeric monkey, the research also resulted in an aborted fetus, said the study.
They observed a “high donor cell contribution,” in the liveborn monkey.
“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, CNN reported. He’s the 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.
According to the study, the birth paves the way for advancements in genetic research.
“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 added. “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.”