In mid-November, researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center announced that they had created the world’s first fully formed, cloned monkey embryos and harvested batches of stem cells from them.  Successful creation of the cloned embryos, each from a single monkey skin cell, effectively settles a long-standing scientific debate about whether primates, which according to evolutionary theory are taxonomically related to humans, are biologically incapable of being cloned, as some had come to believe after years of failures.  As Rick Weiss reports in the Washington Post, “The Oregon researchers did not transfer the embryos to female monkeys’ wombs to grow into full-blown clones, as had been done with several other species.  The scientists destroyed them to retrieve the embryonic stem cells growing inside.”  Because these stem cells were grown from cloned embryos, those cells are genetically matched to the monkey that donated the initial skin cells.  Therefore, any tissues or organs grown from them could be transplanted into that monkey without the need for immune-suppressing drugs.  How did the team do this?  The Oregon team used electrical shocks to fuse skin cells from a 9-year old rhesus macaque with monkey egg cells whose own DNA had been removed.  Perhaps accounting for their ultimate success, the team used a new DNA-removal technique that did not involve the chemical dye usually used to help scientists see the genetic material.  They had concluded that the dye was harming the fragile eggs.  As is always the case with cloning, fluids in the eggs “reprogrammed” the skin cells’ DNA so that the newly fused entities began to divide and grow into embryos.  Of 304 efforts, 213 resulted in embryos, of which 35 grew into 5-day-old blastocysts, the stage when stem cells appear.  The team fished for stem cells from 20 of those and succeeded in two, for an overall efficiency about the same as is seen with mouse cloning today.  As Shoukhrat Mitalipov, of the Oregon Research Center, has claimed, “. . . we hope the technology we developed will be useful for other laboratories working on human subjects.”   How should we think about this development?  Is this a good thing?  Several thoughts: