Medical research and animals: how close to human is too close?

[Altherion]

I have relatives and friends who work in medical research and based on their stories, American universities and labs do a lot of experimentation with mice. This often goes quite badly for a specific mouse which has been bred to test a treatment for some unpleasant disease, but, let's face it, few mice have particularly nice fates in human society and they don't live all that long in any case. The downside of using mice is that they're obviously quite different from human beings which evokes the question: how close to human beings can we go before the research can be considered unethical? On one extreme, there are groups which argue that even mice don't deserve such treatment and on the other, well...

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Scientists in China announced this week that they've successfully made five clones of a gene-edited monkey to aid in researching a number of conditions relating to circadian rhythms. The idea is that having a group of five genetically identical monkeys will help remove variables in research, but the whole experiment raises some rather murky ethical issues as well.

Researchers at the Institute of Neuroscience (ION) of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Shanghai intially gene-edited a group of monkeys to make it more prone to disorders that stem from circadian rhythms. Because of this gene editing, the monkeys "exhibited a wide-range of circadian disorder phenotypes, including reduced sleep time, elevated night-time locomotive activities, dampened circadian cycling of blood hormones, increased anxiety and depression, as well as schizophrenia-like behaviors."

Note that before gene editing, there was an additional advantage to working with mice, insects and the like: their breed quickly enough to get them into a desired state whereas larger animals reproduce slowly and working with them isn't practical even if you ignore the ethical side of the issue. With CRISPR and cloning, it is now becoming practical to experiment even with primates... but should we?