U.S. company claims cloned humans and made stem cells

U.S. company claims cloned humans and made stem cells

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A California company said on Thursday it used cloning technology to make five human embryos, with the eventual hope of making matched stem cells for patients.

Stemagen Corp. in La Jolla, California, destroyed the embryos while testing to make sure they were true clones. But the researchers, based at a fertility center, said they believed their ready source of new human eggs would make their venture a success.

Other experts were skeptical about the claims, published in the journal Stem Cells. If verified, the team would be the first to prove they have cloned human beings as a source of stem cells, the master cells of the body.

There are several types of stem cells. Embryonic stem cells, made from days-old embryos, are considered the most powerful because they can give rise to all the cell types in the body.

The Stemagen team said they got five human embryos using skin cells from two adult men who work at the IVF center. They said they had painstakingly verified that the embryos were clones of the two men.

"We hope it is a bit of a turning point for many more studies," Andrew French, who led the research, said in a telephone interview.

They used a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT, which involves hollowing out an egg cell and injecting the nucleus of a cell from the donor to be copied -- in this case, the skin cells from the men.

It is the same technique used to make Dolly the sheep in 1996, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult. Researchers hope to use the technique to create tailor-made transplants of cells, tissue or organs for patients, treating injuries and diseases like juvenile diabetes.

full story (http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN1721774620080117)

If nothing else, this will advance Halloween decorations into the use of exact copies of my own body parts. Can't wait!

Gattaca here we come....

http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/1885/clonesyi2.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

Didn't the US Congress pass a law banning human cloning experiments and research? Or have I been watching too many Science Fiction flicks?

I've heard that the technology is there to do it (or close anyway) but not the funding due to conservative base backlash regarding the sanctity of human life, etc. Human cloning is inevitable, however. Just like the nuclear bomb. Once the genie is out the bottle everyone will want to regulate the process in order to keep it "ethical" but lots of luck with that one.

Stem Cell research is controversial enough but Human Cloning just shatters the hell out of any accepted ethical standards in Western medicine today. It is unfathomable to the medical community that they would have to decide the value of bio-engineered human life and therefore shape the ferocious political debate. That's a rolling ball of knives for them - there is no way to stop it but eventually the medical community will have to deal with it and the consequences of their decision either way.

Just like the theoretical physicists had to grapple with the ethical ramifications of harnessing the power of the atom – it became an ethical mess and a lot of people who worked on that endeavor thought they could make it “pure science” and willfully ignored the political ramifications of their discoveries and triumphs. Then they were horrified, HORRIFIED to learn that their research was being used in the creation of a city-killing super weapon. Hey, the military loves amoral scientific minds. A lot of Manhattan project scientists told themselves (much to their regret later) that they were rushing to build the first nuclear power plant! Nothing must be more liberating to a theoretician than discarding the global consequences of their research.

This human cloning debate is not going away.

As if human life wasn’t cheap enough already – now we’ll have a potential population of Xerox Copy Citizens to consider. Will they be just a resource (like an army for example) or will they be deemed individuals with the same rights and freedoms as any naturally conceived person? My money is on the Clone Army. And they will all look like Jango Fett.

I'm pretty sure cloning is illegal within the U.S. However, since this company is in California, they could easily have moved a lab down to Mexico, or they could claim to do all their experiments in International Waters a few miles off the coast.