Company Says It Produced Human Embryo Clones By GINA KOLATA A small, privately financed biotechnology company said yesterday that it had created the first human embryos ever produced by cloning. But the embryos died before they had even eight cells, and most died long before that. Cloning experts outside the company said …
Company Says It Produced Human Embryo Clones
By GINA KOLATA
A small, privately financed biotechnology company said yesterday that it had created the first human embryos ever produced by cloning. But the embryos died before they had even eight cells, and most died long before that. Cloning experts outside the company said the experiment was a failure.
But by pursuing the research and publicizing it, scientists at the company, Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., have stepped into an ethical controversy. Federal money cannot be used for cloning research involving human embryos, and so the experiments are restricted to the private sector.
Advanced Cell Technology was not trying to clone a human being. Rather, it wanted to offer a method that would involve combining human eggs and a person’s own cells to create embryos that would provide stem cells. Theoretically, the stem cells could in turn grow into virtually any cell type and serve as replacement tissue in diseases like diabetes.
Such therapeutic cloning would have the advantage that the replacement tissue would be an exact genetic match, so patients would not have to take anti-rejection drugs. But the idea has raised ethical concerns because it would require destroying a cloned embryo to extract its stem cells.
In July, the Advanced Cell Technology revealed that it had been secretly working on therapeutic cloning for a year, paying young women
