Thank you!

I really liked the concert at LessOnline (especially "The Ninth Night of November" which is rather personal for me because FTX told me on November 3 2022 that they would fund me, and November 10 that they were in trouble, and November 14 that "the funds to support your work are gone with everything else".

So, this is just a reminder to please release the album (unless you already did and I just can't find it).

Specifically the CITES regulation makes it difficult to get nonhuman primate cell lines from researchers outside of the USA, or share our cell lines with them. There's not any good conservation reason for this.

Thanks for your support! I really think you're making a great impact here.

I'm sorry to break this to you, but cloning requires live cells, not just DNA. This is one of the reasons why it's so hard to bring back the woolly mammoth. (The other reason is that it's really hard to do IVF on elephants.)

So if you want to make a clone, you'll need to do something like what I did (take cells and preserve them in liquid nitrogen).

Preserving the entire brain is much more difficult than preserving cells, and requires specialized equipment.

I don't know if targeted crossover is plausibly feasible.

It is definitely feasible. This is how artificial gene drives work.

So that's why you can't just make a human baby without knowing what you're doing: You stand a high risk of making a baby with developmental abnormalities that weren't severe enough to abort the fetus, but are severe enough that the child is suffering. If for some reason the moral consequences of that aren't enough to dissuade you, consider that other people would ban you and your children and your children's children and your artificial children and any similar research for 1000 years.

I cannot overemphasize this!

As a rough estimate, I think 3x to 5x more expensive. Marmosets are smaller (smaller than squirrels) whereas macaques (rhesus/cyno) are about 10x bigger (6 kg). And macaques take longer to develop (3 years vs. 18 months until adulthood). Finally, macaques are in high demand and low supply for pharma research.

But the benefit is that methods developed in macaques are more likely to translate to humans, due to the closer evolutionary relationship. Marmosets are a bit unusual in their embryonic development (two twin embryos share a common, fused placenta!) 
 

Unfortunately monkeys (specifically marmosets) are not cheap. To demonstrate germline transmission (the first step towards demonstrating safety in humans), Sergiy needs $4 million.

And marmosets are actually the cheapest monkey. (Also, as New World monkeys, marmosets are more distantly related to humans than rhesus or cynomolgus monkeys are.)