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According to Jesse Reynolds'
article, (Project Director on Biotechnology Accountability at the
Centre for Genetics and Society) posted on February 12th, 2009 in
Biopolitical Times. In the last two months, three teams of researchers
have created human clonal embryos and before them only the researchers
at the biotech company Stemagen had reported creating a human embryo
via somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) that appeared to be viable
enough to potentially yield stem cells. However, none of the groups
reported taking that step.
The Stemagen paper described
how human eggs necessary for SCNT were obtained, but none of the
three recent papers mentioned where or how thy got eggs, or how
the women who provided them were treated. Were the women paid? Were
they undergoing egg extraction for reproductive purposes, or just
for research? How old were they? And how were they recruited?
Two of the new papers,
both from Chinese teams, simply describe their successful method
of creating the clonal embryos. Only the paper by the group led
by
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Robert Lanza of the
biotech company Advanced Cell Technology goes one step further,
comparing the epigenomics of clonal embryos that were created using
human eggs with those created using animal eggs, and it indicated
that the clonal embryos created using animal eggs "cytoplasmic hybrid
embryos" may not yield useful stem cells, as their epigenetic characteristics
are significantly different from those created with human eggs.
Some may conclude that
women's eggs are therefore necessary for cloning-based stem cell
research. Other scientists are moving away from cloning techniques
altogether. Alan Trounson, president of the California Institute
for Regenerative Medicine said that working with human embryos is
impractical because the high failure rate means it takes hundreds
of eggs to create a single stem cell line. He added that most people
are working on IPS (induced pluripotent cells) rather than the nuclear
transfer because it is so difficult to get human eggs.
More information could
be found at:
www.biopoliticaltimes.org/article.php?id=4524
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