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BEAVERTON, Ore.--Tanja Dominko focuses her microscope on a glistening monkey egg recently retrieved from a female Rhesus's ripened ovary.
Nudging a high-tech joystick, she directs a hair-thin glass needle toward the silvery orb--touching, dimpling and then gently piercing its outer coat.
"We're in," says Dominko, as she injects a tiny payload of monkey DNA to replace the egg's own genes, already removed. She backs the needle out of the egg, leaving the new genes in their yolky home to direct the growth of a monkey that will be biologically identical to the one that donated the DNA.
Dominko is part of a team at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center n the only facility in the United States, and perhaps the world, trying to clone a monkey. If the researchers succeed, they will have produced the first genetic replicas of these close human relatives for medical research.
But if today's efforts go as others have, this newly formed cell will become two cells, then four, then perhaps eight, and then die.
Cloning, it turns out, is a serious health risk--usually...