Scientist fashioned first cloned human embryo, says report

In a major revelation scientist from California claimed to have fashioned the first mature cloned human embryos from single stem cells taken from adult. The report was published in Journal Stem Cells.

Stemagen, a small private company confirmed that its scientist used cloning technology to produce five early stage embryos from the donated human eggs and skin cells from two men.

•   E-mail Article
•   Printer Friendly
•   Text-Size    

Using the technique called Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) in which an egg nucleus is taken out and impregnated with the nucleus of a cell from the donor who is to be cloned. Three women donated the egg while DNA was taken from skin cells two male.

The research, led by Andrew French, the Chief Science Officer of the Stemagen gave the detail account of their research. French mentioned that if his team did not try tried to collect stem cells.

“If we had tried to get stem cells from them, we might have lost everything,” he added.

This research became the first such research which in which DNA from skin cell was being able to infuse with an egg to reach various stages of embryonic development from pronuclear formation to early cleavage to blastocyst. This development stages were observed after the incubation of the fertilized egg in standard In Vitro Fertilisation culture media.

The team included Andrew J French, Catharine A Adams, Linda S Anderson, John R Kitchen, Marcus R Hughes and Samuel H Wood.

This news has been given a positive response which will give many a hope to use this technique for various therapeutic cloning.

Till now many such news hogged the limelight but none have been confirmed as being the successful one. In 2004 Hwang Woo Suk fluttered the scientific community after announcing that his team had created human clone, but the revelation later examined to be a lie.