Image Credit: Maggie Bartlett, NHGRI
Scientists report first success in cloning human stem cells explains researchers have broken a barrier toward human cloning. For animals, cloning has been an established process since 1996, when Dolly was cloned using nuclear transfer.
The technique requires a quality unfertilized egg cell with the nucleus removed. The nucleus from a donor cell is inserted into the egg cell and then with electrical or chemical stimulus, the egg begins dividing as if it had been fertilized with sperm.
The techique has worked for decades with animals, but never humans. As the Time article describes, a researcher at Oregon Health and Science Center has succeed in producing a dividing human embryo. His goal was not to clone a human, but rather, to create embryonic stem cells that could be coaxed into any type of cell within the body. It is believed this is on the path to regenerating body organs with the patient's own DNA, eliminating the requirement of anti-rejection drugs.
(My novel, Roman DNA, is based upon nuclear transfer, so check it out if you want to read one perspective of where all of this might lead.)
Troubling to many people, including myself, is that the harvesting of embyronic stem cells requires the destruction of a human embryo. After nuclear transfer, the embyro is permitted to divide for almost a week, when it is ball of cells with the highly-prized embyronic stem cells on the outside. These are harvested for whatever purpose, and a viable human embryo is then lost.
For a while, it almost seemed that human cloning was prevented by some unknown mechanism, similar to the tale of Edwin Corley, The Jesus Factor. In his novel, he develops the idea that a nuclear bomb cannot explode if it is moving - hence the title, The Jesus Factor. The idea being, that mankind was protected from nuclear armageddon by divine design. From a science perspective, it is pure bunk, but from a philosophic perspective, it is an intriguing tale.
So now it seems there is no divine design to prevent human cloning. I hope we are careful.
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