Human intelligence is one of evolution’s most consequential inventions. It is the result of a sprint that started millions of years ago, leading to ever bigger brains and new abilities. Eventually, humans stood upright, took up the plow, and created civilization, while our primate cousins stayed in the trees.

Now scientists in southern China report that they’ve tried to narrow the evolutionary gap, creating several transgenic macaque monkeys with extra copies of a human gene suspected of playing a role in shaping human intelligence.

“This was the first attempt to understand the evolution of human cognition using a transgenic monkey model,” says Bing Su, the geneticist at the Kunming Institute of Zoology who led the effort.

According to their findings, the modified monkeys did better on a memory test involving colors and block pictures, and their brains also took longer to develop—as those of human children do. There wasn’t a difference in brain size.

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.

“The use of transgenic monkeys to study human genes linked to brain evolution is a very risky road to take,” says James Sikela, a geneticist who carries out comparative studies among primates at the University of Colorado. He is concerned that the experiment shows disregard for the animals and will soon lead 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,” he says.

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.

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

Film at 11.... 😟

Have the Chinese not seen the various versions of the cautionary tale known as Planet of the Apes?

Prolly not.. that all happened here in America... 😟

What is it with scientists today.....trying to make monkeys more like us???
Why can't they just accept monkeys for who they are?

Somebody forgot to mention to James Sikela that ....

NOT IN CHINA BUT DIRECLTY BELOW HIS STATE OF COLORADO IS THE BELOW GROUND TOP SECRET MILITARY BASE IN DULCE NEW MEXICO ...ON A BUTTE...UNDER A BUTTE...filled with half human half animal experiments...
Plus captured aliens that they experiment on or have enslaved to do our "technical bidding" in creating new beings with multiple traits of :

Human DNA + Animal DNA + Alien DNA = wacky friggin creatures....D.U.L.C.E. IS LIKE the movie "THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU" but not in the ocean somewhere...

And this COLORADO geneticist is complaing about the Chinese "slippery slope" of monkey brains with a few spliced in genes ??? WTF?

Jonesie!
You can’t be blabbing about this stuff! The target on your back is big enough as it is...

Monkey Lives Matter

I remember when Kramer was trying to tell us about the Pig-men...🌫

Ha ha, charade you are.

uh oh...Caesar's gonna be pizzed...macaques are considered a sub-species to chimpanzees...

I think our very own SmokeMonkey, after being genetically modified by tobacco, has proven to be more intelligent, cognitive and socially adjusted than many of our humans on the politics threads. Give us mo monkey!

Nope, Mo Monkey, Mo Problems

I thought this was the name of your new band.

I gotta say... I'm a little disappointed.

No, that’s Space Monkey Mafia. We only play 1980’s Billy Joel.

Monkey see, monkey do?