Koreans Report Ease in Cloning for Stem Cells

Is this a clear and present danger or a crucial medical advance?


By Gina Kolata
Published: May 20, 2005 New York Times

South Korean researchers are reporting today that they have developed a highly efficient recipe for producing human embryos through cloning, and then extracting their stem cells.

Writing in the journal Science, the researchers, led by Dr. Woo Suk Hwang and Dr. Shin Yong Moon of Seoul National University, said they used their method to produce 11 human stem cell lines that were genetic matches of patients who ranged in age from 2 to 56.
The method, called therapeutic cloning, is one of the great hopes of the stem cell field. It produces stem cells, universal cells that are extracted from embryos, killing the embryos in the process, and that, in theory, can be directed to grow into any of the body's cell types. …….

The new finding buoyed researchers who had wanted to use such stem cells to study diseases but had thought it would be years, if ever, before it would be practical to obtain them. "It is a tremendous advance," said Dr. Leonard Zon, a stem cell researcher at Harvard Medical School and the president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, who was not involved in the research……..

"You almost have no reason not to do it," said Dr. Davor Solter, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology in Freiburg, Germany. He added that it seemed more efficient to clone and obtain human stem cells than to do the same experiment in animals, although no one knows why......

Dr. Ruth Faden, the executive director of the bioethics center at Johns Hopkins, said the moral debate would change if the research led to new treatments with dramatic benefits for some patients. "That could really shake it up," she said.
But Dr. Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's ethics and religious liberty commission, said his group would not be assuaged.
"We believe a cloned embryo is a human being," Dr. Land said. "We should not be the kind of society that kills our tiniest human beings in order to seek a treatment for older and bigger human beings."



http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/science/20clone.html