Armed with monkey sperm, rhesus macaque eggs and mitotic spindles, the Pittsburgh Development… Armed with monkey sperm, rhesus macaque eggs and mitotic spindles, the Pittsburgh Development Center is once again monkeying around with genetics.

And as expected, PETA is going bananas.

The National Institute of Health recently awarded the PDC a five-year grant of nearly $6.4 million, money that will be used to fund the center’s ongoing research on the cloning of nonhuman primates. The money refreshes funds originally conferred for the same research in 1998, to principal investigator Gerald Schatten, Ph.D., and a distinguished team of colleagues from the PDC, a center with scholarly ties to Pitt.

The new five-year grant period will be marked by ambitious and rigorous science, as the team attempts to overcome known obstacles to cloning primates. Previous efforts to impregnate rhesus macaque eggs thru nuclear transfers have failed because of inadequate configurations of the mitotic spindle, which is critical to the process of cellular division.

Dr. Christopher Navara, co-investigator of the project, said that the team has hypothesized that the process of removing DNA from the egg damages important proteins critical to the formation of the spindle. The team will need to figure out the reason that this happened in order to succeed.

According to a press release, the scientists have a couple of new tricks up their sleeves to help this time around – tricks they hope will allow them to overcome these genetic barriers and successfully clone 10 monkeys, their ideal goal.

According to Navara, the project will utilize the service of two or three male monkeys, who will donate their sperm through “a standard ejaculation procedure.”

“Fairly routine,” he added.

But Mary Beth Sweetland, spokesperson for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said she would not be surprised if the “standard ejaculation procedure” used at the PDC is the “easiest” method currently at use today: electroejaculation, during which a metal clamp, administering an electric shock, is placed on the monkey’s penis.

Sweetland, who is currently investigating another primate lab at an unspecified American university, insists the lab is no luxury hotel for the monkeys.

“Primates in labs are treated like prisoners of war,” she said, adding that they are confined to cramped cages and not allowed to socialize with each other, nor follow their natural impulses.

“This is curiosity at its worse,” she said, referring to cloning.

Successful cloning of these monkeys could aid researchers studying diseases in humans, according to the PDC’s press release.

“Valuable discoveries have been made – and continue to be made – using mice, rats and other genetically modified rodent species as models for human diseases,” Schatten said, in the press release. “Yet many serious disorders often cannot be appropriately studied in these lower animals.”

Cloned monkeys, then, would provide better models for testing treatments and monitoring human brain development than would other animals.

But the process of cloning remains a controversial debate worldwide. Dolly, the first mammal ever to be cloned, was euthanized at the age of seven in February, after contracting a progressive lung disease as well as developing arthritis in her left hind hip and knee.

The death of cloning’s leading lady raised many eyebrows within the scientific community regarding the current effectiveness of the cloning process and the welfare of the animals involved in the testing, although it remains unclear whether or not the defects are a direct result of the current cloning methods.

“Whether it’s monkeys or mice, it’s a waste of animal lives, and it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money,” said Sweetland, whose organization is devoted to animal rights, including abolishing animal testing completely from science.

She refers to cloning as a “bad habit” within the scientific community, a habit that the public has come to accept, yet one that hasn’t yielded any benefits to human health.

“What they don’t tell you is that 98% of the time, cloning experiments fail,” she said. “The ethical implications of that are staggering.”

Navara admitted that first-generation cloned animals often develop health problems. But he added that their subsequent offspring are generally born healthy.

According to the press release, a scientific advisory board will check the researchers’ work. The team, consisting of regional and national bioethicists, theologians and scholars, will analyze the ethical and societal implications of the scientists’ goals and achievements.

“It is our intent to keep everyone alive and happy,” Navara said about the monkeys.

“Good intentions are not good enough,” said Sweetland.