Monkey Business Pays off

Monkey Business Pays off (Bloomberg)

Chinese researchers announced yesterday that they’ve been able to create two monkeys (macaques) with customized genetic mutations. These “engineered” monkeys — named Ningning and Mingming — were created via a new “gene-editing” technology called Crispr. This technology allows scientists to “insert, delete, or rewrite a specific gene sequence.” Heretofore, scientists had only been able to manipulate the genes of mice, rats and zebrafish. Because primates’ biological systems are so much closer to our own than rodents or fish, performing genetic tests on them yields results much more likely to match up to human responses. So, what does this situation mean for invertors? Well, genetic manipulation to fight dreadful diseases is a leading hope within the scientific community. And it is widely believed that once an exact sequence is found to combat an individual disease, we should be able to develop additional sequences from that original strand in a fraction of the time.