The New York Times (free one time registration required) has a news piece on the Stemagen cloned human embryos, with reference to "making copies of people" and implantation of cloned embryos for reproduction.
One of the men who donated the fibroblast skin cells is also the owner of Stemagen.
The NYT has more on the story behind the cloned human embryos:
The Stemagen scientists, led by Andrew French, an animal cloner recruited from Australia, used skin cells from Dr. Wood and another Stemagen employee as the DNA source. They used 29 eggs donated by young women at the fertility clinic that Dr. Wood manages.
Five blastocysts were developed. One was shown to be a clone by genetic testing, the scientists reported, and two others also showed good evidence of being clones.
Dr. Wood said the key to success might have been choosing egg donors who were known to be fertile and healthy because they had previously been successful donors at his fertility clinic.
The women were also donating at the same time to couples wanting babies. Some eggs went to the couples and the others to the research, with the consent of both the donors and the couples. The donors were paid for the eggs that went to the in vitro fertilization but not to the research, Dr. Wood said.
Therapeutic cloning has been hampered by lack of access to healthy eggs, in part because it is often considered unethical to pay women for such donations. Dr. Daley of Harvard said Stemagen’s “egg sharing” approach appeared to be a reasonable way to obtain eggs.
The media will have fun with this story.
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