Company Says It Created Cloned Human Embryos

Jan 18, 07:42 AM

By Rick Weiss

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON

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 growing personalized stem cells for patients suffering from diseases.

Creation 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. That could prompt renewed controversy on Capitol Hill, where the debate over human cloning has died down as of late.

Five 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.

No one knows whether those embryos were healthy enough to grow into babies. 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.

"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.

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. When transplanted into patients, the tissues would not be rejected because the immune system would see them as "self."

Opponents of research on human embryos lashed out at the approach.

"This study seems to confirm that human cloning ... is technically possible," said Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "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. It does not answer the ethical or social questions about the mass-production of developing human lives in order to destroy them. ... It only tells us that these questions are more urgent than ever."

No law bans cloned babies , but the Food and Drug Administration has said such experiments would require its approval.

(c) 2008 Virginian - Pilot. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved. Company Says It Created Cloned Human Embryos
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