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Stanford Jumps Into Cloning Fray

Posted by michael on from the splitting-hairs dept.

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.

3 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Brave and Good by Lars+Arvestad · · Score: 5, Informative
    Sweden will probably be a source of stem cells. This solution has been suggested by Bush's administration.

    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.
  2. W.Post: Private funding protects Stanford research by rhwalker22 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

  3. Very inaccurate... by encino · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.