Church of God News

Scientists added human brain genes to monkeys. Yes, it’s as scary as it sounds.

April 12, 2019

Scientists in China have created a new kind of monkey. It’s got a human brain gene. And that just might make its intelligence a little bit more like ours. …

Beijing’s National Science Review journal, researchers took human copies of the MCPH1 gene, which is believed to play an important role in our brain development, and introduced it into monkey embryos by means of a virus that carried the gene.

Of the 11 transgenic macaque monkeys they generated, six died. The five survivors went through a series of tests, including MRI brain scans and memory tests. It turned out they didn’t have bigger brains than a control group of macaques, but they did perform better on short-term memory tasks. Their brains also developed over a longer period of time, which is typical of human brains. …

Bing Su, a geneticist at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, told MIT Technology Review that he’s already testing other genes involved in brain evolution:

One that he has his eye on is SRGAP2C, a DNA variant that arose about two million years ago, just when Australopithecus was ceding the African savannah to early humans. That gene has been dubbed the “humanity switch” and the “missing genetic link” for its likely role in the emergence of human intelligence. Su says he’s been adding it to monkeys, but that it’s too soon to say what the results are.

Su has also had his eye on another human gene, FOXP2, which is believed to have graced us with our language abilities. Pondering the possibility of adding that gene to monkeys, Su told Nature in 2016, “I don’t think the monkey will all of a sudden start speaking, but will have some behavioral change.” …

Su’s prediction that his tinkering would cause behavioral change raises a slippery slope concern: If we deem it acceptable to make an animal slightly more human-like, we may end up normalizing that process and find ourselves generating animals that resemble humans to ever greater degrees.

Changing monkeys’ behavior and intelligence raises major ethical issues

If you make primates smarter and more human-like, you’re not doing them any favors — not least if you’re going to then keep them locked up in a lab. In the words of University of Colorado bioethicist Jacqueline Glover, “To humanize them is to cause harm. Where would they live and what would they do? Do not create a being that can’t have a meaningful life in any context.” https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/12/18306867/china-genetics-monkey-brain-intelligence

“This was the first attempt to understand the evolution of human cognition using a transgenic monkey model,” said lead geneticist Bing Su of the Kunming Institute of Zoology.

The experiments, described on March 27 in a Beijing journal, National Science Review, and first reported by Chinese media, remain far from pinpointing the secrets of the human mind or leading to an uprising of brainy primates.

Instead, several Western scientists, including one who collaborated on the effort, called the experiments reckless and said they questioned the ethics of genetically modifying primates, an area where China has seized a technological edge. –MIT Technology Review

“The use of transgenic monkeys to study human genes linked to brain evolution is a very risky road to take,” said University of Colorado geneticist James Sikela, who conducts comparative studies on primates. He is concerned that the research will open the door to more extreme modifications.

“It is a classic slippery slope issue and one that we can expect to recur as this type of research is pursued,” added Sikela.

Research using primates is increasingly difficult in Europe and the US, but China has rushed to apply the latest high-tech DNA tools to the animals. The country was first to create monkeys altered with the gene-editing tool CRISPR, and this January a Chinese institute announced it had produced a half-dozen clones of a monkey with a severe mental disturbance. –MIT Technology Review

“It is troubling that the field is steamrolling along in this manner,” says Sikela.

Scientists have long sought the genes which, according to evolutionary theory, caused human brains to become intelligent while those of chimpanzees and other simians were left behind despite our genes sharing similarities of around 98%. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-11/monkeys-injected-human-brain-genes-and-it-made-them-smarter

This is wrong to do, but is happening anyway. I first warned about monkey-human experimentation just over five years ago (see Russia looking at total GMO food ban; the frightening chimera research).

As far as the difference between human and monkey brains goes, it is more than some tissue differences.

Here is a video that goes into some of the differences:

10:09

Here is a link to the sermonette video: Scientists search for the human soul, but …

BBC reported about what it called an animal that would be half-human and half-pig. Is such a thing possible? Are chimeras for real? What about a “humanzee”? Are scientists really working on these type of creatures? Is this good? Can something truly be half human and half animal? How are humans different from animals? What is the ‘spirit in man’? What is man? Dr. Thiel addresses these issues and more with biblical-based responses.