11.45 am
WASHINGTON - A United States company says it has cloned a human embryo in a breakthrough aimed, not at creating a human being, but at mining the embryo for stem cells used to treat diseases.
It is the first time anyone has claimed to have successfully cloned a human embryo,
and 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.
"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 US Congress has moved to outlaw all human cloning. A proposed new law is under consideration by the Senate, where lawmakers expressed some alarm at today's announcement.
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.
"There's one big variable here, and that's the US Congress," West told CNN.
"Given that we have regulations in the United States that prevent cloning, we felt that we should go forward and publish this scientific result so scientists can have this data," West added.
"Time is of the essence for people who are dying of life-threatening disease. We want to apply these technologies as fast as we can -- of course, with appropriate debate, appropriate oversight."
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. They're not a human life," West told NBC.
ACT Vice President Joe Cibelli, who led the research, said his team had utilised classic cloning technology using a human egg and a human skin cell. They scraped the DNA out of the egg cell and replaced it with DNA from the nucleus of the adult cell.
The egg began dividing as if it had been fertilised by a sperm, but instead of becoming a baby it became 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 fertilisation, 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.
"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, said in a phone interview.
"They were able to show that by taking a certain stage of the human egg cell and by treating it, they were able to make it develop into an early stage embryo without it ever being fertilised at all. 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 George W 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.
The reaction was quick from Congress, where both cloning and stem cell technology have been debated at length.
Senate majority leader Tom Daschle said he did not yet quite understand what ACT had done. "But it's disconcerting, frankly," Daschle said on Fox News Sunday.
"I believe it will be a big debate, but at the end of the day I don't think we're going to let the cloning of human embryos go on," Alabama senator Richard Shelby, a Republican, told NBC.
"I find it very, very troubling and I think most of the Congress would," Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, told NBC.
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.
- REUTERS
Feature: Cloning humans
Professor Severino Antinori
Human Cloning Foundation
bioethics.net
Religious Tolerance looks at cloning
11.45 am
WASHINGTON - A United States company says it has cloned a human embryo in a breakthrough aimed, not at creating a human being, but at mining the embryo for stem cells used to treat diseases.
It is the first time anyone has claimed to have successfully cloned a human embryo,
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