Cloning is at present as much an art as a science. The success rate is very low. What really gave the Korean team an edge was that they were able to obtain 242 human eggs from 16 women volunteers who took hormone treatment to stimulate egg production.
An ethics committee in the West might have questioned this, as the women themselves got no benefit. An
American or European team would be lucky to get 20 eggs, as they are in short supply for IVF treatments, never mind ‘blue skies’ research.”
Nigel Hawkes, London Times.
“The Korean scientists, if their experiment is confirmed in other laboratories, will have proved, in principle, the viability of the first step in therapeutic cloning, that of converting an ordinary body cell back into the embryonic state. But one element in their success is simply that they were able to amass enough human eggs to get the standard techniques to work, and had no legal restrictions standing in their way.”
Nicholas Wade, New York Times.
As many of you know, a team of South Korean researchers reported in the February 13 issue of the journal "Science" that it had created a cloned human embryo from which it derived stem cells. However gussied up in over-hyped promise of future "benefit," the simple truth is that tiny human lives were manufactured to be looted for parts.
This use of cloning to create and destroy human embryos is a sign of moral regress.
In fact, the loss in human life was much more extensive than most press reports suggested.
Using the 242 human eggs, the team of veterinary cloning expert Woo Suk Hwang and gynecologist Shin Youg Moon made 213 embryos at the two-celled stage.
Forty survived to the "compacted morula" stage (3-4 days), then 30 to the blastocyst stage (5-7 days).
From this the researchers were able to get inner cell masses from 20, but established a stable stem cell line from only one.
Hwang and Moon attempted to shield themselves from criticism by arguing that they were not intending to produce a baby (so-called "reproductive cloning") but tailor-made replacement cells to assume the duties of cells damaged by disease (referred to as "therapeutic" or "research" cloning).
But this was little more than the typical ruse, as a reading of the "Q&A" written for the London Times by Nigel Hawkes demonstrates.
Referring to the South Korean work, the question was posed,
“How is this different from cloning human babies?”
The answer?
“Not very different, except that the development of the embryo is halted at an early stage, after just a week, and long before it would be recognisable as a baby,” Hawkes writes. “Technically the same process could be used to create a baby, if the developing foetus had been placed in a woman’s womb rather then being used as a source of stem cells.”
The list of ethical barriers they leapfrogged is, to put it mildly, formidable, and the inventory of moral dangers is thicker than an old Sears and Roebuck catalogue.
Before further criticizing their work, it is necessary to know in a general way what they did. As you quickly discern, this is a layman’s explanation!
As Hawkes suggested in the quote reproduced above, the research protocol used would hardly be acceptable by our standards. Sixteen women were pumped full of powerful hormones to stimulate the production of eggs (ova) which were then harvested.
The nuclei of the eggs were removed and replaced with the nuclei of cumulus cells (cells that surround a woman’s eggs).
According to the Chicago Tribune,
“Chemicals in the egg's interior, or cytoplasm, then caused it to reprogram the replacement nucleus, deactivating the adult genes and switching on embryo genes,” a kind of Rip Van Winkle in reverse.
“Researchers were able to collect embryonic stem cells from the resulting cell mass inside 20 cloned blastocysts, which are very early embryos.”
Only when the egg and the nucleus from the cumulus cell came from the same woman did the clones mature sufficiently to make stem cells.
As the "Science" article explains, eggs that received nuclei from adult cells of women other than the donor (or from adult male cells) did not produce stem cells.
But for all the eggs harvested, nuclei sucked out, and cloned blastocysts manufactured, the South Korean researchers were only able to produce a single culture of embryonic cells.
And because the South Korean team used the nucleus from a particular female body cell --the cumulus cell-- thus far the technique works only for women.
As the input-to-success ratio suggests, “Cloning is an arduous process, and using it to create tailor-made replacement cells may prove impractical,” as Gina Kolata, writing in the New York Times, explained.
“Cloning uses human eggs, and that means finding young women who agree to be donors. Dr. John Gearhart, a stem cell expert at Johns Hopkins University, estimated that even if there were eggs and even if scientists knew how to efficiently get cloned stem cells that match a patient and to turn them into replacement cells, it would take months, perhaps a year, to make cells for an individual patient.”
It is always difficult, of course, to defeat something (however theoretical in nature) with nothing. And although you'd barely know it by reading most press accounts, there are very viable alternatives.
“Some scientists say it would be more practical to use stem cells from adults,” writes Andrew Pollack for the Times News Service.
“While some experts say these cells cannot be grown outside the body as easily as embryonic stem cells and may not be as versatile [both highly debatable points], they are more predictable in what kind of cells they turn into.”
Then there is Brian Alexander, author of “Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion.” Alexander supports cloning, including the use of cloning to produce a live birth. In an interview with Wired.com, he made this intriguing concession.
“It's possible that there may be a better way to do this. It might be done by taking cells already in our body and switching their function,” he said.
Ironically, Alexander offered as an example actor Christopher Reeve, a vociferous proponent of the use of embryonic stem cells and cloning, who was paralyzed when he was thrown from a horse.
“He [Reeve] is somehow managing to gain some function back that people didn't think he was going to get, thanks to this intense program he's in,” Alexander told Wired.com.
“They think what's happening is some cells are being recruited and switching their jobs. It's possible his body is regenerating, in a small way....”
There are other possible options, including freezing the stem cell-rich blood from the umbilical cord of newborn babies.
Stay tuned to Today’s News & Views and National Right to Life News for ongoing stories and critiques of cloning. We need to be fully informed if we are to repel this latest foray.
The stem cells are "human life" only under the most broad term you can image. They are from homo sapiens, and they are alive. They are not humans themselves. You would correctly call a stem cell human in the same sense you would call an automobile human. You kill millions of more "human lives" every time you blink than from a stem cell.
Cloning is at present as much an art as a science. The success rate is very low. What really gave the Korean team an edge was that they were able to obtain 242 human eggs from 16 women volunteers who took hormone treatment to stimulate egg production.