Human cloned embryos

Oddly, there is very little notice of the confirmation that Advance Cell Technology has created cloned human embryos. Current bioethics and science reporting evidently takes the creation and destruction of human embryos for granted. In fact, the embryonic humans were created with the intention of destroying them.

No one - or almost no one - seems to notice.


Wired Science has one of the few reports that narrows in on what should be the headline:"Research Breakthrough: Human Clones May Be Genetically Viable."

It is significant that (as reported earlier) human-animal hybrid embryos do not appear to be a practical source for human embryonic stem cells. However, after reading the article itself, it appears that the story with in the story may be - I believe should be - even more significant.

The article, "Reprogramming of Human Somatic Cells Using Human and Animal Oocytes," is available online and free, here, in pdf form. Supplemental information is available here.

Lanza and his colleagues report that they used human eggs and human donor DNA to create about 50 cloned human embryos, all females. They also write that they used a human embryo started by in vitro fertilization as a "control," or material to test the validity of their other results.

Cells were removed for testing from some of the cloned human embryos and the IVF human embryo. Other than that, we do not know the fate of these embryonic human girls.

Edited January 27, 2010 to correct a "Label" typo

Human-animal embryos don't work for stem cell production

The New Scientist has a good review article that explains a new research report from Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology, that attempts with "thousands" of embryos created by placing human DNA into the oocytes or eggs of animals have failed to produce stem cells. NatureNews, the news arm of the journal, Nature discusses the report, here.

The abstract of the article, "Reprogramming of Human Somatic Cells Using Human and Animal Oocytes" published in Cloning and Stem Cells, is available here. The list of researchers is very long and they are from several different laboratories.

Each of the news articles above includes statements from researchers who do not believe that human-animal cloned embryos are a dead-end for stem cell researchers. However, the confirmation of the outcome from several labs, with different researchers, is strong evidence that it is unlikely that this technique is a reasonable way to produce "patient specific" stem cells - those that are an exact match for the donor of the DNA.

I have not read the actual article, yet, but from the news articles and the abstract, it appears that the "cybrids" do express the genes of the donor DNA and are clones of the donor. However, while enucleated human oocytes are able to reprogram the DNA of the donor to result in embryos that divide to the stage at which it is possible to harvest embryonic stem cells, the emptied eggs of cows and rabbits do not. The cybrids only divide to about the 16 cell stage and do not turn on the genes responsible for pleuripotency, or "stem-cell-ness."

See my Update, written after I read the report.