Specter of Cloning May Prove a Mirage
By Stephen S. Hall,
The New York Times
| 02. 17. 2004
A rose is a rose is a rose, even if - like many commercial plants -
it is essentially a clone. But is a normal human blastocyst, a
microscopic bubble of proto-life that forms about five days after sperm
meets egg, the same as a cloned blastocyst?
That
may seem an arcane technical question in the debate about human
cloning, reignited last week with the announcement by South Korean
scientists that they had cloned a human embryo and harvested embryonic
stem cells from it. But scientists, politicians and bioethicists have
been grappling for years with the biological and moral subtleties
encapsulated by that tiny dot of tissue.
The future
of human therapeutic cloning in this country - the laws governing it,
the knowledge to be gained from it, the ethical costs of doing it and
the medicines it might eventually bestow - may hinge on how society
views that question.
In last week's report in the
journal Science, researchers at Seoul National University described how
they had created some 30 cloned human blastocysts in order to harvest
human embryonic stem...
Related Articles
By John H. Evans, Craig Callender, Neal K. Devaraj, Farren J. Isaacs, and Gregory E. Kaebnick, Issues in Science and Technology | 07.04.2025
The controversy around a ban on “mirror life” should lead to a more nuanced public conversation about how to manage the benefits and risks of precursor biotechnologies.
About five years ago, the five of us formed a discussion group to...
Riquet Mammoth Kakao (c.1920)
by Ludwig Hohlwein, Public Domain via Flickr
Colossal, the de-extinction company, scored headlines (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) recently by announcing that they had created mice! Not just any mice, not even colossal mice, but genetically engineered, normal-size “woolly mice” that are the result of editing seven genes in mouse embryos. This Colossal presented as an important step toward making a specimen of charismatic megafauna – a...
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 05.06.2024
It was a cool morning at the beef teaching unit in Gainesville, Florida, and cow number #307 was bucking in her metal cradle as the arm of a student perched on a stool disappeared into her cervix. The arm held...
By Gregory E. Kaebnick, STAT | 09.15.2023
Ian Wilmut, the British scientist behind the first-ever cloning of a mammal, died Sept. 10, leaving behind a twofold legacy. One part is groundbreaking science. Creating Dolly required a combination of genome manipulation and reproductive tools that helped launch what...
