The teams behind the research appear to be forthcoming about what they hope to learn. In one paper, the researchers state that the reason they developed monkeys prone to these disorders is to learn more about how they can be treated in humans. "BMAL1 knockout monkeys are potentially useful for studying physiological consequences of circadian disturbance, and for developing therapies for circadian and psychiatric disorders," the paper's abstract says. Meanwhile, the cloning project "paves the way for developing macaque monkey disease models with uniform genetic background."

That said, some have raised ethical concerns -- both with the idea of gene-editing monkeys to make them more disposed to these serious disorders as well as with cloning an animal like that for research purposes. "If I were on an ethics review committee, I would be very hesitant to approve [this research] because of the incredible amount of harm to the animals," bioethicist Carolyn Neuhaus from The Hastings Center told Gizmodo.

China's Xinhua news agency (via Reuters) claims that the research was "in line with international ethical standards for animal research," but the ethical discussion around the experiment otherwise doesn't appear to be publicly available right now. Regardless, it seems reasonable for some to be questioning the value of this research compared to the apparent suffering of the subjects.