CGS-authored
A California company has brought human cloning research to a new level with efficient production of cloned human blastocysts - an early stage of embryos.
The company, Stemagen in La Jolla in California, hopes that its achievement will be the first step towards using cloning techniques for biomedical research and, potentially, therapy. But first they will need to go the next step - using such blastocysts to establish self-propagating lines of embryonic stem cells that, as clones, would be genetically identical to a patient.
Cloned human blastocysts have been reported before, but not at this level of achievement. The five cloned blastocysts produced by Stemagen are the first ones to be made with adult human cells - in this case male fibroblasts1.
Korean researcher Woo Suk Hwang claimed in 2004 and 2005 to not only have created cloned human blastocysts, but also to have produced stem-cell lines from them. His results turned out to be fraudulent. In May 2005, Miodrag Stojkovic and his group at Newcastle University, UK, reported that three cloned embryos had made it to the...