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N e w s - F u l l S t o r y :
Doctors push ahead with efforts to clone humans WebPosted Sat Mar 10 12:48:32 2001 ROME-- Opponents are calling it
"grotesque," advocates say it may be the last hope for infertile males
to pass on their genes. Either way, efforts to clone a human are continuing.
Three doctors, one from Italy, one from Israel, and the other from the United
States, announced Friday they intend to push ahead with attempts to clone
humans, despite objections and doubts by some religious and scientific groups.
Trying to quell concerns over the project, Italian Severino Antinori and
American Panayiotis Zavos told a symposium in Rome they are motivated solely by
the desire to help infertile couples have children.
Antinori told a group of scientists and journalists, "Some people say we
are going to clone the world, but this isn't true. We're talking science, we're
not here to create a fuss."
Zavos, who resigned his post at the University of Kentucky to work on the
cloning project, said they have been bombarded with e-mails from some 600 to 700
couples eager to try the new technology in order to have children.
He says cloning humans is the next step, following the first mammal clone,
Dolly the sheep, born in 1997.
Cell insertion
Zavos and Antinori plan to use regular cells or undifferentiated stem cells
from a man and insert them into a woman's egg stripped of its genetic material.
The cell will then be stimulated to divide and create an embyro equipped with
all the specialty cells to make up a copy of the man. This cell would then be
implanted in the woman's uterus.
The woman could also be the one cloned, depending on a couple's choice.
Long road ahead
Experts working with animal clones doubt whether the doctors will actually be
able to make the technology work in humans.
Dr. Harry Griffin, of the Roslin Institute where Dolly was produced, says
humans can probably be cloned, but that it's not inevitable.
He says the efficiency of animal cloning in published work is very low.
Around two per cent of embryos created by cloning make it to term. Often, the
embryos die late in pregnancy, or soon after birth, and show developmental
abnormalities.
The doctors did not give the location of their clinic, saying only it was
somewhere in the Mediterranean, and that they have no intention of breaking any
anti-cloning laws.
Other cloning stories
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