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First Human Clone Eight Weeks Along

Posted by chrisd on from the send-in-the-you-know-whats dept.

Vegeta99 writes "An Italian researcher is claiming ground-breaking progress, and has successfully cloned a human, and the mother is now 8 weeks pregnant, according to this article. Now how long until I can buy my own clone?" It's worth noting that the Roman medical associations bioethicists denied Dr. Antinori permission to proceed with these experiments last month. So doing the math, Rome was a little late... If the pregnancy continues without miscarriage, the tyke may share a birthday with Marie Curie

3 of 540 comments (clear)

  1. Re:what's wrong with clones anyways? by popeyethesailor · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's a lil more involved than that.. This Old BBC interview gives a layman's explanation of what's involved.

  2. Re:What I want to know is: by rark · · Score: 5, Informative

    Eh, no.

    Each ovum has an X chromosome. Each spermatozoa has an X xor Y chromosome. The only determiner of sex in baby mammals (and in birds afaik, as well) is which, of set (X,Y) chromosome the fertilizing spermatozoa carries. XX = female, XY = male (okay, this occasionally breaks, creating humans with XXY, XYY, etc combinations. If you want to know more, I highly recommend google.

    For a clone, the *only* determiner of sex is the sex of the original cell, which will *always* be the same sex as the original donor.

    There is evidence that temperature (as well as the amount of time between coitus and ovulation, and a few other things) affects the likelihood that a particular ovum will be fertilized by X-bearing or Y-bearing sperm in humans, and I suppose a similar thing could happen with chickens, but while I know of many lower animals (amphibians are, I believe, the highest order animals that do this) change sex in response to environmental change, I know of no birds or mammals that do so.

    So two people with the same DNA will obvious not be reproducing in the usual way.

    There have been experimental techniques involving fusing the genetic material in two ovum, and if this was used to produce offspring that had the same genetic-mother (or genetic-father, if a similar technique could be used for sperm, but that problem is more complex) then what would happen would depend largely on the genetic specifics of the person(s) involved. But the same thing could be done with two ova from a (non cloned) woman, so...

  3. Wrong, for a few years now by damiangerous · · Score: 5, Informative

    All Mammal clones possible so far are FEMALE!
    You will never see this fact cited ever in a non-journal article.
    You will never see this "fact" because it really isn't a fact.
    See this article from way back in 1999 about the first male mouse clone.