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Stanford Jumps Into Cloning Fray
smackthud writes "According to this article in the Minneapolis StarTribune website Stanford University is planning to clone human embryos. Story summary says it all: 'Stanford University announced today its intention to clone human embryos, becoming the first U.S. university to publicly embrace the politically charged procedure. The intent of the project is to produce stem cells for medical research.'" Stanford has released a statement distinguishing what Stanford is doing from reproductive cloning.
I think the decision was that US govt funded research would only be allowed on existing cell lines. At the time of the decision, Sweden supposedly had the largest number of cell lines, and would therefore be the main provider. Consequently, research funding organisations in the US have already started funding some research in Sweden.
Note that if new cell lines are produced from new embryos, even in other countries, they would not be allowed in US govt funded research.
Since the decision, there have been some suggestions of obtaining human cell lines from other sources, but I don't think it has been shown to work yet.
Reality or nothing.
Read The Washington Post's article, which notes: "The new institute, which will aim to create stem cell therapies for cancer and other diseases, is to be established with $12 million from an anonymous donor. Under a Bush administration policy announced last year, federally funded researchers wishing to work with human embryonic stem cells must limit their endeavors to a small number of approved cell colonies created before Aug. 9, 2001. But because the Stanford institute will be privately funded, researchers there will be able to create and experiment on new colonies."
I forget the name, but it technically is not cloning! Though it's moving a nucleus from a real person to an egg, it's not cloning.
Furthermore, there's some 19-ish (bio majors correct me) cell limit before it becomes and embryo. It's not getting something that resembles a human and tearing it apart for cells, as it never gets past a very small ball of [stem] cells!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The therapeutic cloning approach of the Stanford researchers also has great potential, but the process of creating and destroying embryos to harvest stem cells seems to be more complicated than using adult stem cells. Further, some experiments in which embryonic stem cells were reimplanted ominously gave rise to carcinomas. Many research scientists think both approaches should be pursued.
I'm a biochemist here at Stanford and Irv Weissman (the dude in charge of the project) is not talking about cloning at all. He's talking about taking existing stem cell lines, and swapping in new genetic material. It's a modification of existing cell lines that involves no new egg cells (or sperm cells), no fertilization, and no organismic development. Even the US Catholic League is okay with this. Besides, if it fell under the definition of human cloning, Stanford would lose federal funding, which it is certainly not willing to risk. I am very much against actual human cloning for a variety of ethical reasons, but this honestly isn't even close. Swapping interesting genes in and out of an existing cell line in order to study them is really not a big deal.
Stem cells are available from far more sources than aborted fetuses. Like umbilical cords for instance. Nothing wrong with taking a few samples that way.