UCSF scientists are attempting to use controversial cloning techniques to generate human embryonic stem cell lines. At least half a dozen other groups in the United States and abroad also are getting involved in such work, signaling a renewed global push to achieve what experimenters in South Korea falsely claimed to have done last year.
The ultimate goal ranks among the most important in experimental biology: to create “patient-specific” stem cell lines to study how diseases develop and to make transplant cells matched to a patient’s own genes, thus avoiding the usual risks of rejection. The first of the donated eggs are expected to be transferred to the researchers as early as Monday.
Scientists said they had no way to predict how long it might take to complete the experiments or what chance they have to succeed.
Researchers plan to use a cloning method known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT.
..
Some politicians — including President Bush — want to outlaw the research on the grounds that it could encourage illicit attempts at reproductive cloning. And besides long-standing religious objections, pro-choice advocates worry about the potential harm to women who provide the human eggs involved.
…
Separate teams are pursuing essentially the same goal as UCSF, including scientists at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge, Mass. A formal announcement is expected within a few weeks.
Some religious analysts say all human cloning is inherently immoral.
“What is ultimately being proposed in therapeutic cloning is the generation of very young beings that are human so that desirable cells may be removed from them, thereby always destroying those young human beings,” said the Rev. Tad Pacholczyk, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia.