Newsday.com

Scientists make human embryo clone

BY DELTHIA RICKS

January 18, 2008

Scientists at a small biotech company in California say they have cloned five human embryos from the cells of in a technological feat they claim will one day provide a source of viable embryonic stem cells.

The coveted primordial cells that scientists theorize may one day be used to treat a range of human afflictions were not generated in the experiment. And the five clones, created in the laboratories of Stemagen Corp., in La Jolla, were destroyed.

Dr. Samuel Wood, a medical doctor and chief executive of the company, along with a colleague, donated skin cells to begin the process of making human clones. DNA from those cells was transferred to human eggs. Creating human clones is not considered groundbreaking. But the next step, which could have been a landmark -- generating viable stem cells from human clones -- did not occur.

Wood told Newsday Thursday that the new work provides a proof of principle that human clones can be developed in the laboratory and ultimately used as a source of embryonic stem cells.

"We have a very simple goal, to create the most therapeutically useful [stem cell] lines that are possible," Wood said in a telephone interview. "We consider this a major milestone in our attempt to reach that goal."

Wood and Andrew French, Stemagen's chief scientific officer, authored a paper in the journal, Stem Cells, describing how they created the clones.

Cloning human embryos is not new.

British scientists claim to have cloned a human embryo two years ago, proving that humans can be replicated in the laboratory just as scientists have been able to clone a host of animals.

Wood said the next phase of his research will involve following his cloning recipe but taking it to the next level, which would involve extracting stem cells.

Reaction was mixed Thursday to the Stemagen report.

"I applaud their efforts and I think it is very important that their research continues," said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass.

But, without producing stem cells, no one knows whether the cloning technique can lead to the highly sought cells, Lanza said.

Last week, he reported a step forward in attempts to generate stem cells in a technique designed to extract them from an embryo without destroying it.

Christopher Henderson, co-director of the Motor Neuron Center at Columbia University and a researcher investigating the potential of stem cells to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis -- Lou Gehrig's disease -- commended Wood's incremental approach.

"It's much better to move forward in small carefully validated steps," Henderson said yesterday "than to try to make huge headline-news by doing the whole thing at once and not doing it properly."

Wood's efforts, however, revive memories of the bogus experiments by Hwang Woo-Suk, the South Korean who claimed two years ago to have extracted human stem cells from cloned embryos. He retracted the claim after the global scientific community questioned his work, which was revealed to be fake.

Ethics arguments face Wood and others who attempt to clone humans -- for any reason.

"We've been objecting to human cloning for any purpose for many years," said Richard Doerflinger, deputy director for Pro-Life Activities at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington D.C. "We think there should be laws against it as there are in other countries, and as the United Nations has called for."

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