Mature Human Embryos Created From Adult Skin Cells – washingtonpost.com
Creation of the embryos — grown from cells taken from the company’s chief executive and one of its investors — also offered sobering evidence that few, if any, technical barriers may remain to the creation of cloned babies. That reality could prompt renewed controversy on Capitol Hill, where the debate over human cloning has died down of late.
Five of the new embryos grew in laboratory dishes to the stage that fertility doctors consider ready for transfer to a woman’s womb: a degree of development that clones of adult humans have never achieved before.
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"This study seems to confirm that human cloning . . . is technically possible," said Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "It does not show that a viable or normal embryonic stem cell line can be derived this way, or that any such cell has ‘therapeutic’ value. It does not answer the ethical or social questions about the mass-production of developing human lives in order to destroy them. . . . It only tells us that these questions are more urgent than ever."
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In the new work, the team took skin cells — some from Wood’s arm and some from an anonymous Stemagen investor — and fused them to eggs from women who were donating their eggs to help infertile women. About one-quarter of the resulting clones, or five in all, developed into five-day-old blastocysts.
Wood said the key was that his lab is directly adjacent to a fertility clinic with which the company has an arrangement, so his team obtained the eggs within an hour or so of when they were retrieved from the women’s ovaries.
And although researchers are typically given the poorest quality "leftover" eggs from fertility patients, donors in this experiment — and the women for whom those eggs were intended — agreed to give away several of the best eggs because, in each case, they had far more than were needed.
"They are the heroes in this," Wood said. "Think about it. You’re spending $25,000 [trying to get pregnant], and you’re giving some of those eggs away."
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Asked what it was like to look at embryos that were replicas of himself, Wood said: "I have to admit, it’s a very strange feeling. It is very difficult to look at an embryo and realize it is what you were a few decades ago. It is you, in a way."
This is how it was done
The intention is to harvest stem cells, which of course kills the embryo. It’s shameful.
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