Next step… cloning babies. Not sure if I’m ready for that step.
Researchers at Oregon Health and Science University have successfully created human embryonic stem cells by cloning.
By doing so, the science community has taken a giant step toward developing replacement tissue to treat diseases and could also be a step toward the day when cloned babies could be a possibility.
The scientists took skin cells from an eight month old baby with a genetic disease and combined them with donated human eggs. The result was human embryos that were genetically identical to the baby. They were then able to extract stem cells from these created embryos.
This technique is basically the same process that was used to create Dolly the sheep and many of the cloned animals that have followed although in those cases the created embryos were implanted in the womb of surrogate mothers.
Dolly was a domesticated sheep and the first mammal to be successfully cloned. She was the only lamb that survived into adulthood of 227 attempts. She died at age six even though the life expectancy of her breed of sheep is usually 11 or 12. She died of a progressive lung disease which is fairly common in sheep. If is not believed that her early death was related to her creation process but there will always be some doubt.
The Oregon researchers, led by Prof. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, did not implant their human embryos and said they had no intention of doing so. Despite the fact that dozens of animals have been cloned using this technique, called nuclear transfer, human cells have remained stubbornly resistant to the process.
