Scientists Clone Human Embryo

Yeah, its not a very sexy photo, but I work with what's available.

Its time to log off for now, but not before covering this little tiny item.

This is a fascinating report. How many people will be saved in a few years by this research? I'm not sure, but it should be thousands or more world wide.

This stuff makes me a little nervous. Should scientists be fucking with this? I have no idea. Oppenheimer probably shouldn't have fucked with atomic energy, but I sure wasn't consulted.

The Californian-based company Stemagen said on Thursday that they had created human embryos by cloning skin cells of adults. Their hope is to obtain the embryos’ stem cells for the purpose of curing incurable illnesses.

Some twenty years ago the words “cloning” and “stem cells” sounded like magic, almost futuristic and any progress in biological research would be faced with harsh criticism in magazines that would warn of great dangers of cloning.

But things have changed. Especially after a false statement made by Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk in 2004 who said that he had managed to clone a human embryo and obtain stem cells from it. After this scientists became rather sceptical about similar statements. This is why not much attention was paid to a report published by the “Stem Cells” journal on Thursday. The authors said they had managed to create a human embryo and believe they could harvest stem cells from it as raw material for ‘creating’ all types of tissue necessary for the human body (the heart, muscles, liver etc.). Scientists separated the DNA from donated ova and replaced it with the DNA obtained from skin cells of two volunteers, creating embryos with their genetic make-up. Still they have not extrapolated the stem cells from the embryo, Time reports.

The company announced that it had created five human embryos using the skin cells of the two men. But after testing they could confirm that the embryos were clones of the two men with complete certainty for only three of the five embryos. The embryos were destroyed after the test.

I do know for sure we're in the "cross your fingers" zone.

Via Javno.