China’s CRISPR drive in animals promises better meat and novel therapies for humans.
Animal researchers in China are less scrutinized by the public than their counterparts in Europe and America. They also have access to larger colonies of monkeys. Ji, who claims that his primate facility adheres to international ethical standards in animal care and usage, points out that the Chinese people have long supported monkey research for human health. He says that \”our religion or culture is different than the Western world.\” He also acknowledges that China’s opinions are changing. He says that in the near future, we will be facing the same problem as the Western world. People will begin to question why a monkey was used to conduct an experiment, because it is smarter than humans.
The Pulitzer Center supported this story as part of a series.
BEIJING GUANGZHOU JIANGMEN KUNMING AND SHANGHAI – Early one morning in February, researchers harvested six eggs from a rhesus monkey–one of the 4000 monkeys chirping, clucking and squawking inside a huge outdoor complex of metal enclosures at Yunnan Key Laboratory for Primate Biomedical Research. The busy facility outside Kunming, southwest China, is working on making monkey embryos that have a gene mutation so they age abnormally quickly when born five months later. Researchers first place the eggs in a red-lit laboratory to protect fragile cells. They examine the eggs under high-powered microscops and prepare to inject one rhesus egg into each. If everything goes according to plan, the team will introduce CRISPR genome editing software before the embryo starts to grow. This is early enough to allow the mutation that causes aging to appear in every cell of the offspring.
As is often the case, things do not go as planned when retrieving eggs. One egg from this morning’s batch was mature enough to fertilise. Niu Yuyu and Ji Weizhi, the facility director who runs gene-editing experiments at the facility, admit that they were \”a little unlucky\” today. But the group can still afford some bad luck. The team, using a combination patience, ingenuity and a large number of animals, has created an amazing range of genome-edited primates to study human diseases.
Source:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/07/china-s-crispr-push-animals-promises-better-meat-novel-therapies-and-pig-organs-people
