How many Planet of the Apes reincarnations to we have to watch before people get more concerned about fiddling with monkeys?

 

Enter the latest: a chimeric monkey.

 

There are a number of “chimera” definitions.

 

One hails from the nightmares of Greek mythology: a fire-breathing monster, with the body of a lioness, a tail that ended in a snake head and goat’s head sprouting from its back.

 

Another is genetic: an animal comprising of two or more populations genetically distinct cells, which retain their own character. Now, this isn’t as Sci-Fi as you think, and is sometimes found in humans, such as non-identical twins.

 

But researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Centre at Oregon Health & Science University have taken this to a whole new level.

 

They have produced the world’s first chimeric monkeys, through “glueing” as many as six or more genomes from separate rhesus monkeys together.

 

This has been done previously with mice, with the first chimeric mouse being created in 1960s. It is considered “very important for science”. According to the Wiki oracle, they offer “insights into such problems as the tissue specific requirements of a gene, cell lineage, and cell potential”.

 

Researcher Shoukhrat Mitalipov, in an interview with Physorg.com, explained that it enabled researchers to track specific genes and eliminate targeted ones.

He said: “The cells never fuse, but they stay together and work together to form tissues and organs…. The possibilities for science are enormous.”

 

“We cannot model everything in the mouse,” he said.

 

“If we want to move stem cell therapies from the lab to clinics and from the mouse to humans, we need to understand what these primate cells can and can’t do. We need to study them in humans, including human embryos.”

 

He flagged the fact that producing human chimera was not on the agenda.

 

He has a point regarding necessary advancements in stem cell research. However, Wild on Science spent large tracts of the festive season documenting the links between comic book superheroes’ (and villains’) powers and scientific causes, both intended and otherwise. Think Spider-Man, Dr Octopus, Cpt America, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man and Batman (although that’s scientific innovation). All this movie watching and comicbook reading was for research purposes, naturally.

 

Mutant monkeys? That strikes me as something to watch very closely.