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BOSTON — Some experts dismissed the experiment as a failure, but Sunday’s announcement by a research company that it had created the world’s first cloned human embryos ever nonetheless brought swift protests from religious and political leaders.
Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester, Mass. — a small, privately funded biotechnology company — reported Sunday it had cloned the first human embryo, a development it said was aimed toward producing stem cells to generate replacement cells as treatments for diabetes, heart disease, spinal injuries and many other ailments.
"We think we’ve shown that it’s going to be possible, in the lifetime of many of us, to take a cell from our body and, by using cloning technology … to take a patient’s cell back in time using the egg cells, sort of a little time machine, and then making these cells that we’ve heard so much over the last few months, the embryonic stem cell, to make your own embryonic stem cells, young cells," said Michael West, president of Advanced Cell Technology.
The scientists described all the work as preliminary. Neither experiment has yet produced the coveted stems cells, master cells which grow into all kinds of body tissues.
"These are exciting preliminary results," said Dr. Robert Lanza, one of the researchers at Advanced Cell Technology. "This work sets the stage for human therapeutic cloning as a potentially limitless source of immune-compatible cells for tissue engineering and transplantation medicine."
A second company quickly claimed Sunday that it had also cloned human embryos, but in unpublished research. The company, Clonaid, said it hopes to eventually create fully-developed human clones. The company keeps its laboratory location secret, citing security concerns.
Advanced Cell Technology’s Lanza and West said they had no interest in transplanting such early embryos into a woman’s womb to give birth to a cloned human being, nor was it clear that their embryo would be capable of that.
The cloned human embryos grew only for a few hours, long enough to form microscopic balls containing just four to six cells each. The creations — made from the fusion of a single skin cell and a human egg — are still so unformed that some ethicists and scientists remain divided over whether they should be called embryos and to what extent they may deserve special moral standing.
Regardless, the work broke enough new scientific and ethical ground to re-ignite a long-simmering debate over human cloning. It’s now illegal for federally supported scientists to conduct research on human cloning, but privately funded scientists such as those at ACT are under no such restriction.
Several states have banned human cloning, and Congress is considering such a ban. And a number of political leaders such as Sens. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., reacted Sunday with dismay to the company’s announcement.
At the White House, an assistant press secretary, Jennifer Millerwise, said President Bush was opposed to the type of cloning described in the announcement Sunday.
"The president in the past has made it clear that he is completely opposed to any type of cloning, of humans or human embryos," Millerwise said.
Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and the majority leader, said he supported cloning of this kind for research purposes. But Daschle added that he would oppose any human cloning for purposes of replicating a person, which he said would face overwhelming opposition in Congress if it were ever proposed.
The Washington, D.C.-based National Right to Life Committee wasted little time Sunday attacking the announcement.
"This corporation is creating human embryos for the sole purpose of killing them and harvesting their cells," said the group’s legislative director Douglas Johnson. "Unless Congress acts quickly, this corporation and others will be opening human embryo farms."
And a critic of the company who used to sit on ACT’s ethics board said Advanced Cell’s announcement was premature and would serve only to encourage such harsh reaction against cloning.
Glenn McGee, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist who resigned from Advanced Cell Technology’s ethics advisory board, called the announcement "nothing but hype." He said the company’s report lacks any significant details, including what cells company scientists actually grew from the cloned embryo. The report doesn’t say if Advanced Cell was able to derive any human embryonic stem cells from its cloning effort.
The research is described in a new and relatively unknown online scientific journal called
E-BioMed: Journal of Regenerative Medicine. The company also arranged special media exclusives through which the work is described in today’s issue of U.S. News &World Report and in the lay science magazine Scientific American — a media-savvy arrangement that some experts criticized as an unprofessional means of sharing new scientific data.
"They are doing science by press release," McGee said.
In findings published Sunday by the online journal, the scientists said they created a six-cell human embryo by injecting a very small cell with its genetic material into a woman’s donated egg. In such cloning, the injected DNA often comes from a skin cell, but the researchers this time used a cumulus cell, which nurtures a developing egg.
This technique could produce replacement cells only for a woman of childbearing age, since the injected DNA comes from a woman’s reproductive system. However, the scientists have been experimenting with injecting adult skin cells into the eggs as well.
In a separate experiment, the scientists showed they could push the development of human egg cells even further with a technique known as parthenogenesis. In that process, they said, six eggs reprogrammed themselves to develop into early embryos.
Such eggs would be largely compatible with the genetics of the egg donor.
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