Laura Bush vs. Science

I love a good cigar but sometimes I take it out of my mouth"

i love karzaks precious innocent views .

Patiodog -- I don't know the answer to your question, but are you sure the 280 eggs are relevant to what the Brits are trying to do? It seems to me that you don't need a viable embryo for therapeutic cloning, as opposed to reproductive cloning. All you need is a couple hundred stem cells, and you can produce these with a lot fewer eggs. Correct?

Perhaps the Korean scientists' most important advantage was the whopping 242 eggs they had to work with. The team obtained oocytes and donor cells from 16 healthy women, who underwent hormone treatment to stimulate their ovaries to overproduce maturing eggs. (The women donated specifically for the experiments, were not compensated, and were informed that they would not personally benefit from the research.) "More than 200 eggs? Wow. I'm drooling," says Jose Cibelli of Michigan State University in East Lansing, who is a co-author of the paper but did not take part in the cloning procedures. When he attempted human cloning at the biotech firm Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts, a few years ago, he says, his team had fewer than 20 usable eggs.

The plentiful eggs gave Moon, Hwang, and colleagues a chance to tweak the methods they used, varying the time between inserting the new nucleus and triggering cell division as well as testing several different kinds of growth media. In the most successful protocol, the scientists were able to get 19 of 66 cloned eggs to develop into blastocysts. That success rate is lower than researchers have reported with mouse and cattle cloning, but "at this stage in the game, it's encouraging," says Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Midlothian, U.K., who helped lead the team that cloned Dolly.

The team's success in deriving stem cells was lower than that of other researchers, however. Whereas some teams are able to derive ES cells from up to half of their embryos (usually created for in vitro fertilization treatments but no longer needed), Moon and Hwang got just one cell line in 20 tries. The authors suspect that some of the cloned blastocysts might have suffered the chromosomal abnormalities observed in other primate cloning attempts.

A total of 242 oocytes were obtained from 16 volunteers (there were one or two donors for each trial) after ovarian stimulation: 176 metaphase II (MII) oocytes were used directly for SCNT, whereas the remaining 66 oocytes were allowed to mature to the MII stage before use in SCNT. Autologous SCNT was performed; that is, the donor's own cumulus cell, isolated from the cumulus-oocyte complex (COC), was transferred back into the donor's own enucleated oocyte.

farmerman wrote:

i love karzaks precious innocent views .

I love his cutting edge use of language...LOL, chicken little and such....and the way he's able to work the same expressions into every single thing he says...over and over....unfailingly.....neverending.....ad nauseum.....

No wonder he's the most popular and seriously considered member of A2K....

If you look at publications in research journals over the past three decades, we actually are losing our position of eminence in basic research relative to other countries. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is happening.