SHT - Human embryo successfully cloned

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Worcester company claims first successful cloning of human embryo Aim of research is mining of stem cells

By Maggie Fox, Reuters, 11/25/01 WASHINGTON -- A U.S. company said Sunday it had cloned a human embryo for the first time ever in a breakthrough aimed not at creating a human being but at mining the embryo for stem cells used to treat diseases.

Biotechnology company Advanced Cell Technology Inc. (ACT), based in Worcester, Massachusetts, said it hopes the experiment will lead to tailored treatments for diseases ranging from Parkinson's to juvenile diabetes.

It also coaxed a woman's egg cell into becoming an early embryo on its own, without any kind of fertilization.

Although animals have been cloned repeatedly since Dolly the sheep made her appearance in 1997, and although there were no real technical barriers to making a cloned human embryo, the research crosses a line that may leave many around the world uneasy and even hostile.

The company was at pains to stress that it did not intend to create ranks of genetically identical babies.

"Our intention is not to create cloned human beings, but rather to make lifesaving therapies for a wide range of human disease conditions, including diabetes, strokes, cancer, AIDS, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease," Dr. Robert Lanza, a vice president at ACT, said in a statement.

The goal is to take a piece of skin and grow a new heart for a heart patient, or some brain tissue for an Alzheimer's patient, or vital pancreatic cells for a diabetes patient. But the announcement quickly drew criticism from those fearing the step would lead to the cloning of a human being.

The U.S. Congress has moved to outlaw all human cloning. A proposed new law is under consideration by the Senate, where lawmakers expressed some alarm at Sunday's news.

Michael West, chief executive officer of ACT, hinted that moves in Congress were why the company moved so quickly to report its findings. Federal law prohibits the use of taxpayer money for experimenting on human embryos but ACT is a privately funded company and can do as it pleases -- for now.

The House has already backed a broad ban on this type of research, and President Bush has praised the bill. The Senate has not yet taken up companion legislation, and several senators said they did not want to rush into legislation without fully understanding the scientific implications.

SOURCE OF STEM CELLS

Advanced Cell Technology said it had used cloning technology to grow a tiny ball of cells that could then be used as a source of stem cells. Embryonic stem cells are a kind of master cell that can grow into any kind of cell in the body.

"Scientifically, biologically, the entities we are creating are not an individual. They're only cellular life," West told NBC's Meet the Press.

ACT Vice President Joe Cibelli, who led the research, said his team had used classic cloning technology using a human egg and a human skin cell. They removed the DNA from the egg cell and replaced it with DNA from the nucleus of the adult cell.

The egg began dividing as if it had been fertilized by a sperm, but was stopped from becoming a baby -- at the stage at which it was still a ball of cells. The same technology has been used to clone sheep, cattle and monkeys.

The company did not say whether it had successfully removed embryonic stem cells from the cloned embryo.

The company also reported a second breakthrough in its paper, published in the online journal E-biomed: Journal of Regenerative Medicine. Researchers took a human egg cell and got it to progress to the embryo stage without any kind of fertilization, either by sperm or outside genetic material.

The process is known as parthenogenesis, and occurs in insects and microbes but not naturally in higher animals.

SECOND BREAKTHROUGH -- 'VIRGIN' CONCEPTION

"You hesitate to describe it as a virgin birth, but it is sort of in that vein," John Rennie, editor-in-chief of Scientific American magazine, which publishes an article by ACT scientists in its January issue and whose reporter watched some of ACT's work in progress, said in a phone interview.

"That is an amazing accomplishment in its own right and, like cloning, something that people once thought was impossible in mammals."

Both cloning and stem cell technology are highly controversial areas of research in the United States. Stem cells are valued by scientists because they could be used to treat many diseases, including cancer and AIDS.

They can come from adults but the most flexible sources so far seem to be very early embryos -- so small they are only a ball of a few cells. Such embryos, usually left over from attempts to make test-tube babies, are destroyed in the process, so many people oppose it.

President Bush decided earlier this year that federal funds could be used for research on embryonic stem cells, but only on those that had been created before August, found at 11 different academic and private laboratories.

When combined with cloning technology, the hope is that patients could be the source of their own tissue or organs, a technology known as therapeutic cloning.

"Human therapeutic cloning could be used for a host of age-related diseases," said West.

REPRODUCTION NOW IN HANDS OF MEN

Groups that have traditionally opposed abortion and embryo experimentation were quick to condemn the research.

"Some may call it a medical breakthrough. I believe it is a moral breakdown," Raymond Flynn, president of the National Catholic Alliance and a former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, said in a statement.

"Human reproduction is now in the hands of men, when it rightfully belongs in the hands of God."

But the Biotechnology Industry Organization supported the research.

"Those of us who have testified before Congress on BIO's behalf regarding this issue have stated repeatedly that reproductive cloning is untested, unsafe, and morally repugnant," BIO president Carl Feldbaum said in a statement.

"BIO does however, support therapeutic applications of cloning of cells and tissues -- techniques that would not result in cloned children, but could produce treatments and cures for some of humanity's most vexing diseases and disabilities, especially and most immediately diabetes and Parkinson's."

The company said it had grown only a single embryo as far as the six-cell stage. But West said that had the embryo been placed in a woman's womb, it could possibly have grown into a human being.

"We took extreme measures to ensure that a cloned human could not result from this technology," he said.

In August, three researchers considered mavericks in the scientific community said they planned to clone people to help infertile couples, but experts told a meeting of the National Academy of Scientists the three lacked the needed skills.

-- Anonymous, November 25, 2001


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