Primate Center Debates Cloning’s Future

Thousands of monkeys play and fight, chase one another and chatter away inside eight corrals in the rolling hills of suburban Portland.

The Oregon Regional Primate Research Center must rely on the walled corrals, each about the size of a football field, to build communities of monkeys for experiments.

But the arrival of Dolly, the cloned sheep in Scotland, and monkey twins cloned from embryos at the center could make monkey corrals obsolete.

If cloning technology proves practical, the center could produce monkeys on demand, or tailor them for specific experiments.

“It is within the realm of possibility that the primate center here could subcontract cloning work, or a biotechnology company could work in collaboration with the primate center,” said Don Wolf, lead researcher on the monkey cloning project.

Producing monkeys that are genetically identical in every respect would allow scientists to speed up experiments on new drugs or medical treatments.

“The immediate practical benefit is that it reduces the number of animals required for research. It could have a huge impact on the cost of research using nonhuman primates, which is frightfully expensive,” Wolf said.

In addition, research on the basic biochemistry that makes cloning work could lead to ways to unlock the secrets of cell regeneration, allowing victims of spinal injuries to regrow nerve cells, or reverse degeneration in the eye caused by various diseases, such as diabetes.

“It could be possible for paralyzed people to walk again, for blind people to see again,” said Ronald Green, director of the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

Wolf, a medical biochemist, created a media stir recently at the 250-acre primate center, hidden among trees in a valley better known for sprouting big computer-company campuses.

Wolf’s announcement that he had cloned two monkeys from embryos brought more than 70 requests for interviews by media from 16 countries. After the publicity and a brief protest by animal rights activists, work has returned to normal at the center.

There was a basic difference between the results in Scotland and here.

In the Scottish experiment, Dolly the sheep was created by cloning a mature, highly specialized adult cell taken from the udder of another sheep that already was 6 years old.

At the primate center here, the rhesus monkey twins--Neti and Ditto--were created by cloning an egg cell just before it began to expand and specialize and develop into a living creature.

Every cell in the body of every living creature has all the DNA it needs to create an exact duplicate of itself.

But most of that DNA gets switched off as an animal grows and the cells specialize into the brain, the heart, skin and bone.

There was no way of working backward, of forcing the DNA to switch on every gene and start over to create an identical copy of itself, until Scottish embryologist Ian Wilmut cloned Dolly.

“This is quite a powerful tool,” said Richard Stouffer, a biochemist and Wolf’s research partner. “I think it’s the future of primate research. I don’t think this place will ever be the same.”

The Oregon experiments were an outgrowth of Wolf’s work on in-vitro fertilization at Oregon Health Sciences University, the state’s medical school, and the primate center.

The center, one of seven scattered across the country, has been providing monkeys for research since Congress established the regional system nearly 40 years ago.

Now its director, Susan Smith, hopes public attention to cloning will build interest in biological research by the National Institutes of Health, similar to the way that the lunar landing program built support for NASA.

“Events like this capture the public imagination,” Smith said.

Still, researchers are wary about public reaction after President Clinton ordered a ban on federal funds for human cloning research.

“Clinton’s response is a bit of a knee-jerk response,” Wolf said. “It’s certainly appropriate to begin starting a dialogue on cloning technology, but cloning a human being is still a long, long way away.”

But it may be difficult to overcome a public perception about cloning already colored by frightening books and movies, such as “Jurassic Park,” said Green, the Dartmouth ethicist.

“The public has a lot of science fiction in its head, and it is fiction,” he said.