Thought this might interest those of you who don't listen to NPR.
pax
misha
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[headers pruned]
Tuesday January 6 7:07 PM EST
Scientist plans first human cloning soon
UPI Science News
WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 (UPI) _ A Chicago scientist says he hopes to
begin the first attempt at cloning a human being within the next 90
days.
Richard Seed, a physicist who worked in fertility research in the
1980s, told National Public Radio today he is negotiating with a
Chicago-area fertility clinic to offer human cloning. NPR said it
agreed not to identify the clinic.
Building on the success of the Scottish scientists who cloned the
adult sheep Dolly last year, Seed says a doctor would remove the DNA
from a woman's egg and replace it with the DNA from the person to be
cloned. Then the doctor would wait a few days to see whether the
result is developing normally as an embryo. If so, the embryo would
be transferred to a woman's uterus.
Impeding the experiment from the start would be the problem of
initiating cell division in a human egg that was not fertilized by a
sperm, says John Eppig, a developmental biologist at the Jackson
Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me. To date in human cells, Eppig says, no
one has succeeded in this process, which is called activation.
In the NPR segment aired on All Things Considered, Eppig and other
scientists also caution that, even once past this stage, Seed would
be risking a high chance of fetal abnormalities. Based on animal
studies, Eppig said, ``there is very, very little that would give you
a secure sense that any baby born from this technique would be born
without abnormalities.''
Most cloning attempts with sheep have failed, prompting both President
Clinton and the National Bioethics Advisory Commission last
year to conclude that at least for now human cloning be branded unethical.
_- Copyright 1997 by United Press International All rights reserved _-
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