Wired magazine in February predicted that scientists would produce the first human clone by early 2002 and fertility expert Severino Antinori in October said he would clone a human within months, while renegade embryologist Richard Seed says all he needs is 120 days and $300,000 to accomplish the feat.
So far, however, no clone has materialized. And experts say that despite apparent advances in animal cloning, a human clone is not likely any time soon -- unless scientists are prepared to take huge ethical, political and scientific risks.
"We're a long way from cloning," said Jamie Grifo, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology at New York University. "There are too many things that could go wrong."
Until the Sept. 11 attacks, cloning -- whether to reproduce a human being or to produce embryonic stem cells -- was one of the nation's top stories, as the country grappled with the moral dilemmas inherent in the issue.
President George W. Bush in August warned of the dangers of "growing human beings for spare body parts."
Now, as scientists struggle to come up with vaccines that might protect against old-fashioned diseases such as anthrax and smallpox, these futuristic scenarios appear, to many, remote.
Not, though, to cloning zealots, who claim success is close at hand.
Italian fertility specialist Antinori, who hit the headlines in 1994 when he helped a 62-year-old woman bear a child, says he can and will use cloning to help infertile couples have children.
Brigitte Boisselier, former deputy director of research at the Air Liquide Group, a French producer of industrial and medical gases, now heads a team of six scientists at a cloning company called Clonaid, which is registered under a different, undisclosed name in Wilmington, Delaware.
Boisselier, who is associated with a fringe religious organization that believes scientists from another planet created mankind, says her team is actively "preparing embryos" and expects to produce a human clone "soon."
"Our next announcement will be when the baby is born," she said. She won't reveal where her laboratory is, nor how far along she is with her cloning experiments, for fear of attack.
Human cloning is banned in most of Europe and a bill seeking to ban it in the U.S. is working its way through Congress.
Both Boisselier and Antinori say they hope to set up laboratories in the UK, after a high court there ruled earlier this month that human cloning experiments could not be legally banned.
That door may soon be closed to them though, as the British Parliament is poised to pass a bill to outlaw the cloning of babies with the intention of bringing them to term. The bill could become law within two weeks.
Boisselier and Antinori have said that if necessary they will conduct experiments on boats in international waters.
Antinori and Boisselier have been vilified by much of the medical community, but some mainstream scientists support their view that we have the technology -- if not necessarily the desire -- to create human clones.
"I think it's technically possible," said Randy Jirtle, professor of radiation oncology at Duke University. "It could even be easier than cloning animals." Jirtle conducted studies showing that one of the prime defects of cloned animals -- excessive growth -- would not be an issue, for genetic reasons, in humans.
Defects in cloned animals -- cattle, mice and sheep -- have provided opponents of human cloning with ammunition in their fight to have cloning banned.
According to the National Academy of Sciences, between 0.5 percent and 15 percent of cloned animals are successfully brought to term.
But a study released on Thursday in the journal Science claimed greater success. The study concludes that 24 of 30 cloned cows were alive and apparently normal after one to four years. To achieve this number the scientists created 110 pregnancies -- a success rate of 22 percent.
"All available scientific and medical data is suggesting these animals are perfectly normal," said Robert Lanza, medical director of Advanced Cell Technology, the Massachusetts-based cloning company that sponsored the study.
It's these kind of statistics that hearten advocates of human cloning.
But Rudolf Jaenisch, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Medical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of the nation's most outspoken opponents of human cloning, is skeptical of statistics showing animal cloning is safe.
"To say they are normal is not correct. They are normal by the criteria they used. These criteria are very superficial," he said.
Whether or not cloned animals are normal, some scientists argue that it is beneficial to study them and to proceed with cloning research on humans in order to advance medical research.
"We can do the science, do the cloning, without making a baby," New York University's Grifo said.
And then, they say, there's the simple desire of humans to extend the boundaries of knowledge, especially about what it means to be human.
"Having opened Pandora's Box with Dolly the sheep, it would be abnormal for humans not to want to look inside it," Jirtle said.
For Jaenisch it's just this kind of unbridled curiosity that could lead to the production of dozens of deformed babies.
"There has been no progress whatsoever in understanding the scientific principal behind cloning," he said.
Researchers at Advanced Cell Technologies say they have produced at
least one six-celled embryo using "the Dolly the sheep technique".
But Prof Ian Wilmut, who led research on Dolly at the Roslin Institute,
believes that there is not enough evidence to say with certainty that the
embryos are true clones.
But if Advanced Cell Technologies can support its findings, reported by an
on-line medical journal, it could mark the most significant development in
cloning in five years.
Dolly may have become the world's most famous sheep in 1997, but it was
the birth of two lambs named Morag and Megan the previous year that
ushered in the era of the clone.
They were created from single cells removed from a lamb embryo. The
technique, known as nuclear transfer, was developed at the Government-
funded Roslin Institute in Edinburgh by a team led by Prof Wilmut.
Nuclear transfer cloning relies on the fact that almost every cell in the body
contains a complete set of genes, the recipe book for creating and
maintaining a living organism written in the four chemical letters of DNA.
The Roslin team removed a single cell from a lamb embryo and extracted
its nucleus, the blob in the centre which contains these genes.
The nucleus may have the genetic instructions for an animal, but it needs
the protection and chemical machinery of an egg to develop into one. So
Prof Wilmut and colleagues took an egg from a ewe's ovary and scraped out
its nucleus.
The donor nucleus was then transferred to the egg and the egg was kick-
started with a burst of electricity. After a few days it was implanted into a
surrogate ewe.
The resulting lambs, which appeared in one newspaper under the headline
"Monsters or Miracles?" were healthy, identical clones.
Cells removed from embryos are relatively easy to clone. The team were
interested to see if the same experiment would work in a fully mature adult
cell and chose an udder cell that had once been part of a six year old ewe.
After 247 attempts, including several still births and aborted foetuses, they
produced Dolly. Much of the research into cloning has been driven by the
prospects of "pharming", genetically engineering animals to produce human
proteins or pharamaceutical products in their milk or blood.
Because splicing human genes into animals is so tricky, the Roslin team
developed cloning as a means of mass producing these "transgenic"
animals. But cloning could also help farmers produce the fittest, leanest
animals for food.
As the Scottish researchers were working on sheep, American, Japanese
and French scientists were cloning cattle.
The first four cloned calves were born in Japan in 1998. Cattle were followed
by Cumulina the mouse, cloned in Hawaii in 1998, and then by Mira the
goat, who was born in 1999.
The Roslin researchers cloned pigs last year. So far monkeys and apes
have proved impossible to clone using the Dolly method - suggesting that
humans may also be tricky.
The only cloned monkeys have been produced by a far cruder technique
known as embryo splitting.
The race to clone human embryos was fuelled by recent discoveries about
embryonic stem cells. In the late 1990s, scientists found that these master
cells could be cultured indefinitely and had the ability to turn into any type
of tissue.
But over the past couple of years, attention has begun to focus on another
type of stem cell, found in fully developed animals and people. Scientists
have shown that adult stem cells can be "reprogrammed" and persuaded to
turn into different types of tissue.
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If the experiments carried out by Advanced Cell Technology, one of
America's leading biotechnology companies, are confirmed, it marks a
major development in genetic research.
The breakthrough came during research aimed at finding new treatments for
diseases such as Parkinson's and diabetes.
The company has no plans to use cloned embryos to create babies.
Instead it wants to exploit the unspecialised stem cells found in newly
conceived embryos for a host of new medical treatments.
British cloning experts last night stressed that the findings were "extremely
preliminary" and that the company had yet to prove it had created a clone.
But pro-life campaigners described the experiments as horrific and said
cloning research that deliberately created then destroyed human embryos
was abhorrent.
Earlier this year the Government approved a change in the law to allow
research in Britain into cloned human embryos for medical research.
Dr Robert Lanza, vice president of medical and scientific development at
ACT, based in Worcester, Massachusetts, said: "Our intention is not to
create cloned human beings.
"Rather it is to make lifesaving therapies for a wide range of human disease
conditions, including diabetes, strokes, cancer, Aids and neuro-
degenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease."
The ACT team said it created the embryo using the same technique that
was used for Dolly the sheep.
It first scraped out the DNA from a human egg cell, then injected it with the
nucleus from a human skin cell and finally kick-started the egg with
electricity.
Because the skin cell nucleus contained a complete set of human genes,
the egg should have begun to develop into a healthy human, genetically
identical to the skin cell donor.
The experiments were intended to exploit the potential of embryonic stem
cells - the body's "master cells", which can go on to turn into any type of
tissue such as muscle, blood, skin or brain.
They can be cultured indefinitely, providing an unlimited supply of tissue for
transplant. Researchers believe that combining stem cell research with
cloning will one day allow doctors to create a cloned embryo of a patient for
use as a tissue factory.
The company did not say whether it had successfully removed embryonic
stem cells from the cloned embryo.
Michael West, chief executive officer of ACT, said: "The entities we are
creating are not individuals. They're only cellular life; they're not human life."
President Bush ruled earlier this year that federal funds could be used for
research on embryonic stem cells, but only on those that had been created
before August, found at 11 different academic and private laboratories.
Federal money cannot be used to fund human cloning research and the
White House reiterated last night that Mr Bush remained "100 per cent"
against such work.
Ian Wilmut, of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, who cloned Dolly the
sheep, urged caution over the announcement. Because unfertilised eggs
could divide spontaneously, the "embryos" might not have been clones, he
said.
The embryos were also slow to develop, he said. "This should be regarded
as a preliminary finding."
The Vatican expressed caution and reservation, saying that further scientific
verification was necessary. If a real embryo was created, then destroyed,
"that must be condemned", said a spokesman.
On the other hand, if ACT had come up with stem cells from other, non-
embryonic stem cells, "then we are talking about a veritable scientific
achievement that we could see as ethically positive".
Bruno Quintavelle, director of the Pro Life Alliance, said the American
research should raise concern in Britain.
He said: "We're horrified by the news. We have to act soon or someone will
exploit the situation in this country. Scientists cannot be trusted to act
responsibly."
The House of Lords is due to vote today on a Bill intended to prevent
doctors from implanting cloned human embryos in humans. The legislation
is expected to go before MPs within days.
But, Mr Quintavelle said, the Bill did not stop anyone from creating those
cloned cells in the first place.
He said: "This country is being targeted by the cloning industry. They are
going to flock here." More Evidence Is Needed, Says Dolly Scientist
source: Electronic Telegraph
PROF IAN WILMUT, from the Roslin Institute, claims it is too early to say if
human embryo is a true clone. David Derbyshire reports it is still too early to say if American scientists have succeeded in cloning a human embryo, according to the man who cloned the first animals.
First Human Embryo is Cloned
source: Electronic Telegraph
AMERICAN scientists claimed yesterday to have cloned the first human
embryo, spreading deep alarm among pro-life groups. )Home( )Events( )Bands( )Members( )GET EDUCATED( )Contact( )Links( )Speak(