Creating Quadruplets

Researchers using a technique called embryo splitting have produced a living rhesus monkey, a female named Tetra, at the Oregon Regional Primate Center in Portland. Professor Gerald Schatten, a researcher at Oregon Sciences University, said the goal is to produce identical monkeys that could be used to perfect new therapies for human disease. Schatten and his colleagues created monkey embryos in the laboratory by combining sperm and egg. When the embryos grew to an eight-cell stage, they were each split into four parts, with each part containing two cells. These were then nurtured into new embryos. In effect, he said, the single embryo became four embryos, all genetically identical. The new embryos were then implanted into the uteri of different mothers.