Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Human therapeutic cloning moves closer to reality

Source: New Scientist
Date: 27 June 2007

Summary:

New Scientist reports researchers have derived stem cells from cloned money embryos, a development that could eventually lead to human therapeutic cloning:

"Human therapeutic cloning has moved one step closer to reality. Stem cells have been extracted from cloned monkey embryos for the first time - and if it works in monkey cells, why not in human cells too? 'It's proof of principle for human therapeutic cloning,' says team member Don Wolf of the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton. Wolf's colleague Shoukhrat Mitalipov announced the breakthrough on 18 June at a meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Cairns, Queensland, Australia. The Oregon team stripped the chromosomes from 278 rhesus monkey eggs and replaced them with the nuclei of skin cells from male monkeys. They derived two stem-cell lines from 21 embryos that developed into a hollow ball of cells known as a blastocyst."