Long tailed macaque monkey / BIGSTOCK
A US-Chinese team of scientists have produced embryos that include human cells and cells of a nonhuman primate, the long-tailed macaque. What are we to make of such experiments? How are we to assess their ethical implications?
Historical precedent
The first thing to note is that this is by no means the first attempt to produce creatures that are a mix of human and nonhuman-primates. Already in the 1920s a Russian scientist, Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov, had attempted to cross human beings and chimpanzees. In a series of experiments in French Guinea he tried to impregnate female apes with human sperm, but without success. One practical problem was that the chimpanzees resisted the artificial insemination procedure. Another was that he had a limited number of experimental animals. They were supplied by hunters who typically captured baby chimps while killing the adults. Indeed, there were serious fears at the time that the species was facing extinction in the wild.