It does not answer the ethical or social questions about the mass-production of developing human lives in order to destroy them. “It does not show that a viable or normal embryonic stem cell line can be derived this way, or that any such cell has ‘therapeutic’ value. “This study seems to confirm that human cloning … is technically possible,” said Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Opponents of research on human embryos lashed out at the approach. And he and George Daley, a stem cell scientist at Children’s Hospital in Boston, said the embryos look only marginally healthy in photos. He said the report did not show the results of molecular tests that scientists typically do to prove that the cloning process was complete.
“I’d really like to believe it, but I’m not sold yet,” said Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass. Other stem cell scientists expressed optimism but said they wanted to see the work repeated and more details presented. “All our efforts are being directed toward personalized medicine and diseases,” said Wood, adding that the scientists did not try to extract stem cells from the first embryos they made because they were focused on proving they could make the clones. When transplanted into patients, the tissues would not be rejected because the immune system would see them as “self.” The closely held company hopes to make embryos that are clones, or genetic twins, of patients, then harvest stem cells from those embryos and grow them into replacement tissues. “It’s unethical, and it’s illegal, and we hope no one else does it either,” said Samuel Wood, chief executive of Stemagen in La Jolla, Calif., whose skin cells were cloned and who led the study with Andrew French, the firm’s scientific officer. But the study leader, who is also the medical director of a fertility clinic, said they looked robust, even as he emphasized that he has no interest in cloning people. No one knows if those embryos were healthy enough to grow into babies. That reality could prompt renewed controversy on Capitol Hill, where the debate over human cloning has died down of late.įive of the new embryos grew in laboratory dishes to the stage that fertility doctors consider ready for transfer to a woman’s womb – a degree of development that clones of adult humans have never achieved before. Scientists at a California company reported Thursday they had created the first mature cloned human embryos from single skin cells taken from adults, a significant advance toward the goal of growing personalized stem cells for patients suffering from various diseases.Ĭreation of the embryos – grown from cells taken from the company’s chief executive and one of its investors – also offered sobering evidence that few, if any, technical barriers may remain to the creation of cloned babies.
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