Scientists Add Jellyfish Gene to Monkeys

Posted On: June 1, 2009

In a controversial achievement, Japanese scientists announced they had created the world’s first transgenic primates, breeding monkeys with a jellyfish gene that made the animals’ skin glow a fluorescent green.

The exploit opens up exciting prospects for medical researchers, they said, which could eventually lead to lab monkeys that replicate some of humanity’s most devastating diseases, providing a new model for exploring how these disorders are caused and how they may be cured.

“Great advances in pre-clinical research can be expected using these models,” the team said. But others warned of a potential ethics storm, brewed by fears that technology used on our closest animal relatives could be turned to create genetically-engineered humans.

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