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Scientists Claim They Cloned Humans

Posted by michael on from the double-your-pleasure dept.

dustinbarbour writes "A South Korean-led research team has cloned human embryos to produce embryonic stem cells, a scientific first that promises to reignite public debate over cloning. Medical researchers hope to use cloned embryonic stem cells to someday treat diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's. The cells potentially could create rejection-free transplant organ tissues." There's another story in the NYT.

30 of 607 comments (clear)

  1. I for one... by holizz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Am in support of using stem-cells to repair organs. It's not really unehical at all. I mean an embryo doesn't have a personality or a self so it's hardly going to miss being alive.

    1. Re:I for one... by queen+of+everything · · Score: 3, Interesting

      They cloned stem cells, that's quite different than a whole embryo. I'm more for cloning stem cells than using the stems cells from babies aborted. It will benefit science by enabling scientists to be able to do research on stem cells, but it won't affect the abortion discussion.

      --
      "Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it." -Albert Einstein
    2. Re:I for one... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      What's wrong with killing adults?

      Well here you digress from every day reality to philosophy, a realm where any bizzare and untrue statement can be supported by ironclad logical argument and the ruthless yet subtle torture of vaguely defined words.

      Opposing views, under a philosophical regime can be championed by rhetoricists, but the outcome of any such adversarial battle has less to do with the truth of their respective arguments than with the skill and luck of the debaters.

      Having said that, I will play my nihilist card +1 and say that there is nothing 'wrong' with killing an adult unless you are the victim, in which case there is the little problem of your death.

      You see, there are no absolute moral truths, only individual goals which are fleeting like human lives. Right and wrong, good and bad lose their emotional connotation, and become more synonymous with correct and incorrect. The ends are the focus of emotion, not the means because there is nobody watching, nobody keeping a score, not reward or penalty for following any set of rules or not. Only results matter, and they only matter to you and those who share your goals.

      People generally don't like their environments to be dangerous. If there is killing going on, there should be some reason why 'it can't happen to them' or it counts as added danger. Unless there is something different about the lifeform to be killed ( like species in the case of the meat we eat ) that we do not share in common, then people are liable to be against it being allowed. The practice of killing adults to harvest cells is scary to the population of adults. Killing kids would be scary to adults too, since people's kids mean alot to them. But killing embryos.. Parentless embryos that are the products of artificial laboritory fertilization.. That is not scary. Nobody will ever BE an embryo ( or a fish ) and nobody will ever have their embryo stolen from them since these are created from donated material. That is not scary.

      The only way it would matter to someone is if they 'cared' about the embryo. The only way someone would care about a few cells they don't know about would be if those cells were important to some individual goal of theirs.

      People who's religions consider embryos to be human beings with souls and whos religions forbid killin human beings, as a 'rule' are opposed. By speaking out against killing embryos they feel they are accruing points with the almighty for sticking up for a rule which their religion confuses with an 'end' or 'goal' in it's own right by postulating an almighty scorekeeper who tracks people's rule following behavior.

      These people, believing in supernatural 'souls' that can do many of the same things that fully developed human minds do, like have emotions and think, and who believe that these collections of a few cells called embryos have souls may see any practice that harms any item bearing a soul as potentially harming them - another item bearing a soul. Rather than form a distinction between themselves and the 'victim' as people often do feel safe from harm ( for instance white slave owners in the 1700's-1860's who condoned, or purpetrated harm towards blacks who they saw as different enough from them for the practice of slavery to feel safe enough to let continue, or Nazis who didn't mind scapegoating Jews even though they may have never met a Jew and so had no cause to hate them. ) Rather than forming a distinction, people who believe in a score keeper to reward their actions and who believe that embryos are bearers of souls may choose to form a kinship with the test tube grown embryos.

      Not that belief in a cosmic score keeper automatically means that people choose to stick up for other items with souls. I think most pre-civil war white slaveowners thought blacks had souls, but I think they thought that good blacks went to 'colored heaven', and that most went to hell, so that it was Ok to treat them

  2. Oh wow by wizarddc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What's with the sensatioanlistic headlines this morning? KAZAA'ers PAY TO USE VPN TO BYPASS RIAA on a story about a company who offers public vpn for $6, with no implicit mention of Kazaa or FileSharing. And now WE'VE CLONED A HUMAN about a korean company who has cloned only an embryo to only a very early stage to generate stem cells, not making Steve 2.0 from Steve. Let's not go overboard, or am I talking out of turn? This is Slashdot, of course. Overboard is the story d'jour.

    --
    Th
  3. Why bother? by SimianOverlord · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Your stem cells can be collected and stored at birth, from the cord blood that is thrown away anyway when they tie the knot to make your belly button. It should be standard practice to store them now from newborns for when stem cell technology matures in the future.

    When I was at Uni, they told us a US company held a patent on the harvesting(?) of cord blood stem cells, and demanded a license fee which is hampering the introduction of this. Don't know how true that is.

    Nevertheless, this bypasses peoples squemishness on the use of embryos for this type of thing, though I don't have a problem with it myself. I can see why this work has been done, but there are a number of ways to generate this material that isn't morally suspect.

    --
    Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
  4. The question by Alioth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    On this morning's Today programme on BBC Radio 4, this very thing was discussed. One of the interesting arguments: at what point to we determine an embryo a human being?

    Is a ball of 100 human embryo cells a human being? One woman on the program was claiming - yes, this is so. I personally think that this is a bit extreme, almost "every sperm is sacred" extreme.

    On an unrelated note, I find it ironic that the same people who claim that abortion at day 3 is criminal are often pro-death penalty.

    --
    Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
    1. Re:The question by Rich0 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It ain't cell count. It is brain activity.

      While some might choose to debate you on where you set the dividing line, let's assume that brain activity is in fact what makes somebody human.

      So, is it OK to euthanize the mentally retarded? How much brain activity is enough - the formation of the first neural stem cell?

      The argument of those who are pro-choice is that a 1-week-old blastula is not a human entitled to civil-rights, and a 1-week-old child is. In most democracies we don't have various levels of human rights (you can harvest organs without consent if they're less than 6 years old, from 6-10 you can only harvest non-essential organs like a single kidney, and above 10 you need consent for anything). In most civilized societies we recognize that if somebody is human there are just some things you can't do to them - such as killing them without due process (and in many countries you can't even do that).

      So, at what point does a non-rights-bearing embryo transition into a full-rights-bearing child? When the toe pokes out of the birth canal? When the head pops out? When the umbilical cord is cut? If the doctor drops a baby before the cord is cut and breaks its neck is he guilty of assault or manslaughter? In societies of 100 million people these cases come up, and there needs to be an agreed-upon definition that makes some sense.

      The child-from-conception argument suggests that we heavily should monitor women whenever they do conceive to ensure that if they're about to have a miscarriage that we are able to jump in there and do everything we can do to save the life of a child. Mothers who do things that increase the likelihood that an embryo won't implant are being negligent parents (just like parents who don't put fences around their swimming pools when they have a toddler). Obviously anyone would admit that this is going overboard, so we are apparently willing to accept frequent deaths of devleoping embryonic children when we wouldn't just let those children die after birth. So there is some wiggle-room to say that there is some point between conception and birth when a child becomes "alive". But, when is it?

      In my opinion, the debate has become so polarized by zealots on both size that reasonable people can't talk about it without being branded a baby-killer or being branded insensitive to women's needs.

  5. But seriously by HarveyBirdman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What are the chances that when I get older I'll need to go overseas for a one of these new transplants (Now rejection free! Two kidneys for price of one!) because the US has banned all stem cell research and related items.

    --
    --- Ban humanity.
  6. 0.4% success rate by peter303 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Worse than the first livestock cloning rates. Thats probably why success hasnt been reported before.
    US labs suffer from high human egg costs. The going rate is about $4,000 per donor. It would cost a megabuck just for the egg cells.

  7. Reigniting Public Debate by TrollBridge · · Score: 1, Interesting
    "...a scientific first that promises to reignite public debate over cloning."

    Especially when editors misrepresent the story with a sensational headline.

    These scientists made stem cells, not a human being. Stop trolling, editors!

    --
    There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
  8. Where's the Debate? by Bruha · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Group A: Primarily Christians and other Religious groups. Are against Cloning for the above reasons. Becuase God's against it.

    Group B: Us heathens who believe otherwise, those who hope to benefit medically from the research and sadly those who want to make a profit.

    So for some reason in America Group A can get laws passed to ban the research. However isnt religious oppression illegal in the US? So why dont the lawyers that represent those companies fight it on grounds of religious oppression?

    1. Re:Where's the Debate? by BigBadBri · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Well, I'm an atheist, and you'd have to make a Group C - 'it's fucking stupid and dangerous' for me.

      If it were possible to grow single organs from stem cells, or to inject stem cells where they were needed and effect a cure, then I might be persuaded that the sacrifice of an egg to be injected with my DNA and then grown on for a few generations is justified.

      But it isn't - and this research adds little if anything to the sum of human knowledge.

      But then, I'm against abortion and fertility treatment on purely irrational grounds, too.

      Now research into making my own cells turn into stem cells - that's where I'd like to see the money spent. No ethical issues, no religious objections (at least, none associated with foetuses), anda reasonable chance of success, since genetic identity is guaranteed.

      --
      oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
  9. Re:The topic here is rather misleading... by Golias · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I would say it's about time for Brave New World to be put on required High School reading lists, except it may already be too late, because it's often seen as terribly old-fashioned these days to be the least bit worried about the issues which that book fretted over, especially the fears of turning all phases of human development, from womb to college, into a manufacturing process.

    Damn, I let my sentences run on when I'm ranting...

    --

    Information wants to be anthropomorphized.

  10. Leon Kass is a Fallacious fool by cookie_cutter · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Dr. Leon R. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics: "The age of human cloning has apparently arrived: today, cloned blastocysts for research, tomorrow cloned blastocysts for babymaking,"

    Slipper slope fallacy - actually, one doesn't necessarily lead to the other. Therapeutic cloning can be done without us having to do reproductive cloning.

    "In my opinion, and that of the majority of the Council, the only way to prevent this from happening here is for Congress to enact a comprehensive ban or moratorium on all human cloning."

    False Dillema fallacy. Kass is saying that we either completely ban all cloning, or we'd have to deal with and accept all types of cloning. In actuality, we can allow cloning for therapeutic purposes(you know, to save lives), while disallowing, or greatly limiting it for reproductive purposes(eg allow it for people who have no other way to reproduce, but disallow it for people who want to clone a legion of duplicates to satisfy their vanity/megalomaniacal ambitions).

  11. Very funny, but a completely invalid comparison by blorg · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Very true, but birth rates in first world countries are dropping, often below replacement levels, and this will cause serious problems for those countries with ageing populations. Some countries (Italy) have gone as far as offering cash payments to parents who have a second child.

    Cloning, when promoted, is generally seen as a technology that could have research or medical therepeutic value, more rarely as one could allow infertile parents to have children that are genetically their own. That's not to say that I agree with human cloning (I'm not sure, and would lean towards against), but 'there are enough people in the world' is not all there is to the argument by a long shot. Look at IVF - it's not exactly producing people by the billions, but rather helping a small percentage of infertile couples.

  12. Re:Scientific, but arbitrary by Jagasian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Ok, but after self reflection, I confirm my existence because I am aware of my self. I do not confirm my existence because I am white.

    Also, as far as we know, and yes it is a "logical jump", thinking can be measured by measuring brain activity. So this seems like it is a far more objective measure of life/no-life than any other currently purposed measure.

    The "when it is born" measure is obviously flawed because it is largely based on the location of one's body (inside vs outside the womb).

    But the "when it was conceived" measure is also flawed as we could claim that sperm and eggs are living humans because they have the "potential" for life. So a menstrating women is committing manslaughter and so is a man, who lets a sperm go to waste. We could even go back further and say that the materials used to create a sperm have "potential" for life...

  13. Re:For crying out loud RTFA! by zerocool^ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Pretty clear - they DID clone embryos, then killed them.

    Let's not get into a killing-an-embryo-is-killing-humans discussion. A 7-day old human embryo is indistinguishable from most other embryos at that percentage through fetal developemnt (~1/39th). At 1/39th development, it is identical to all mamals and almost identical to all vertebrates. Mathematically and biologically, this is no different than doing it with sheep or fish.

    ~Will

    --
    sig?
  14. Re:Important to note.... by kfg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Which, religious issues aside, is roughly equivalent to saying that your fingernails have grown some in the past hour.

    Actual division of a cloned stem cell is certainly a technical achievement, and technically an embryo I suppose, but I'm not sure it's really proper to call it such until such time as it's shown that said embryo is actually capable of cellular differentiation if the division process is continued.

    If all you end up with is a mass of "flesh" you have no embryo.

    KFG

  15. When does a tadpole become a frog? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Is a tadpole a frog IYO?

  16. Re:Cloning . . . good. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Parent asks why cloning babies is bad. If anyone cares IAAMCB (mol. & cell. biologist) - if you can clone people, you can genetically engineer people (manipulation of DNA in cells is not trivial, but it's an established technology - the rate-limiting step is making those cells into whole organisms)

    also - what is the the technology (not stem cells, that has lots of uses but cloning babies) going to be used for?

    1. engineered for "better" characteristics (NB "better" is relative - if I own a big multinational, want my kid to inherit & be tough enough to retain control...hmmm...which genes are linked to conscience again? - don't laugh, many mental disorders have known genetic basises, and recent work may indicate an overrepresentation of certain kinds of borderline psychopaths in the upper ranks of careers where ruthlessness is an asset). Imagine an uber-PHB engineered not to care
    2. "bring my baby back!" - I've been to conferences where some of the big names have talked about getting heartbreaking letters about someone's 5-year old who died, and can they please clone them? Sounds nice, but when the clone comes and is different? Imagine spending your whole life being held up to the standard of some fantasized "perfect child" that your delusional parents are certain you should have been. Anyone who misunderstands the technology enough to want to clone a dead person to "bring them back" is in for a huge disappointment, and then where does that leave the kid? "Who I am is a disappointment, I was supposed to be someone else..."
    3. Organ replacement. People are already having kids in the hope that they will be compatible bone-marrow (or other) donours for exisiting children. In the long run stem-cell tech should fix the shortage etc., but in the meantime how many billionaires are going to want to quietly start "backups" just in case? If you have the money and no conscience (I'm sure there are at least a few like this) - start up a few clones somewhere where there are no rules, have them raised as athletes, and when your ticker stops...see also the example in point 1 for some potentially nasty synergies here.
  17. Again, no matter what they say... by Jay9333 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    ... they didn't clone an embryo. The issue here isn't the modern religious debate over whether or not an embryo is human. The only thing they did was harvest stem cells from an egg. That is a far cry from cloning an embryo, much less a human.

    Note that the definition of "embryo" is a fertilized egg after it has implanted in the womb. That is after weeks of development. These scientists did not create an embryo. Even if they call it an embryo (or the article cited above does), the fact is they admit they let it develop for only 5 or 6 days. At best that could be called a zygote or a blastocyst. And even if they let it develop for weeks (about the same amount of time before implantation would normally occur and it would be called an "embryo") it still wouldn't technically be an embryo since it wasn't implanted in the womb.

    The womb is so important here, because we can't replicate it in a lab. And the womb is necessary for an embryo to exist and develop further into the child that will be born, breath air (instead of fluid), etc. That is why the womb is such an amazing creation, and why Christians emphasize the Bible's references to life existing in the womb in their quest against abortion. If scientists can ever replicate the womb (and they are *very, very* far from being able to do that) we'll need to have this debate in reference to cloning over whether or not embryo's are human.

    For now... all they've done is harvest some stem cells.

  18. Re:Article title misleading by Zathrus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sure an exact demarcation of when an embryo is a baby will never be agreed upon by everyone, but why isn't it an acceptable demarcation to check if the embryo has brain activity?

    Which is defined as... ? Honestly, we don't know when that is. Not to mention that it varies from child to child. There are a large number of research papers on this, and while there's some common agreement that there are definite, individual brain wave patterns at a certain point (24 weeks I think), it's not clear that they don't exist prior to that as well.

    We use that as a measure to determine if already born people are dead or alive

    The obvious difference is that someone already alive goes from a state of thinking to a state of being brain dead. In the case of an embryo the thinking may not have occurred yet, but -- unless there's a problem with the fetus -- it will. It's directly contrary to our experience with brain dead adults, who don't come back once brain dead. The embryo will gain brain activity unless otherwise interrupted.

    It isn't based on religion or politics, but instead on science. Seems objective if you ask me.

    Which is irrelevant when it comes to religion. It's not about objectivity -- it's about right and wrong. If objectivity came into it at any point then Galileo and Copernicus would never have been heretics and we wouldn't still be debating Evolution vs Creation.

    And, for the record, I'm pro-choice... It'd be a nice world where no one ever had to make that choice, but that's a fantasy.

  19. Re:Stem cells important but by Gr8Apes · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ethics and religion are not one and the same, fortunately. Currently, people who shouldn't have babies still have them: think immature teen-agers that don't understand what happened, rapists and their victims, female crack addicts, etc.

    From an ethics standpoint, none of these should have children (teen-agers described above didn't want or even know about children, aren't able to take care of them even if they do have them, rapists certainly don't deserve children, female crack addicts are certainly not providing a good environment for the baby to be...)

    Due to religion, however, people think babies are a divine gift, or something for <insert religious diety here> to be the sole decider of, and therefore there are few, if any, laws regulating this.

    I know this isn't exactly a popular topic...but at some risk, I post this anyways. I'm surely not advocating anything here, for those that like to read too much in between the lines. Merely stating some facts and observances.
    --
    The cesspool just got a check and balance.
  20. Pig-human chimeras contain cell surprise... by alchemist68 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Pig-human chimeras contain cell surprise...at New Scientist...here:

    http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 94558

    Pigs grown from fetuses into which human stem cells were injected have surprised scientists by having cells in which the DNA from the two species is mixed at the most intimate level.

    It is the first time such fused cells have been seen in living creatures. The discovery could have serious implications for xenotransplantation - the use of animal tissue and organs in humans - and even the origin of diseases such as HIV.

    The adult pigs that had received human stem cells as fetuses were found to have pig cells, human cells and the hybrid cells in their blood and organs.

    "What we found was completely unexpected. We found that the human and pig cells had totally fused in the animals' bodies," said Jeffrey Platt, director of the Mayo Clinic Transplantation Biology Program.

    The hybrid cells had both human and pig surface markers. But, most surprisingly, the hybrid cell nuclei were found to have chromosomal DNA that contained both human and pig genes. The researchers found that about 60 per cent of the animals' non-pig cells were hybrids, with the remainder being fully human.

    ...The injections must be given after the body plan of the fetus has developed, but before the immune system is active. The former ensures the animals look like normal pigs and sheep....

    I CANNOT believe that these animals looked like "normal" pigs. If the Pig and Human nuclear DNA mixed, and the animal was 60% percent human, one would think that the animals were more human than pig.

    Cloning isn't so bad when compared to an experiment like this gone awry.

  21. Re:Um, what? Yes they did. by cookie_cutter · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Does anybody know whatever happened with the research on harvesting real adult stem cells from fat tissue?

    I attended a lecture by a big-wig stem cell researcher (sorry, don't recall his name) at my University a few months back, and he addressed the topic of getting stem cells from adult tissues.

    He said that the stem cell research community was initially very excited about this line of research when it first made headlines, because it could allow the same research without the ethical issues connected to embryo's.

    Unfortunately, though early results looked promising, subsequent investigations cast doubt on how useful adult-derived stem cells would be compared to the unlimited pluripotential of embryonic stem cells to turn into other cell therapeutic cell types.

    Also unfortunately, the prospect of using adult stem cells in place of embryonic stem cells is still ceased upon by opponents of embryonic stem research to win over those who don't know the science, and to cast the scientists as being unethical in the face of perfect alternatives. But the science doesn't back this position up.

  22. Re:Weak argument by zymurgy_cat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No, the only logical point to say life has started is at the very beginning. Researchers have the unique challenge of finding ways to enhance human life without taking or harming it. Granted this can be difficult, but I have confidence that people can work within ethical limits and still find honorable ways to do the things they are now trying to do through cloning and abortion.

    Where, exactly, is the beginning? Even the "moment" of conception is not an actual moment. It takes a non-insignificant amount of time for chromosomes to match up.

    You also need to address the flip side of the "beginning" argument. Over half of all pregnancies end through natural abortion/failure to implant. If we assume "life has started at the very beginning" then why do we let all those people die simply because they fail to implant in their mother's wombs? That number is far greater than abortions, murders, car accidents, etc. Why are those lives valued less or treated with less care than others? If we say it's "nature", then why do we interfere with nature by making antibiotics, developing vaccines, or outlawing murder?

    My point is not to start an abortion/when does life begin argument here. Rather it's to point out that you cannot simply solve an ethical issue such as this by taking one extreme viewpoint or another (or any inbetween, for that matter) and implying it logically solves all our ethical problems.

    --
    -- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
  23. Offshored by ninejaguar · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Dr. Leon R. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, called for federal legislation to stop human cloning for any purpose.

    "The age of human cloning has apparently arrived: today, cloned blastocysts for research, tomorrow cloned blastocysts for babymaking," Dr. Kass wrote in an e-mail message. "In my opinion, and that of the majority of the Council, the only way to prevent this from happening here is for Congress to enact a comprehensive ban or moratorium on all human cloning."

    The Shrub and his right-wing religious fundamentalists appear to be insistent on offshoring our genetics lead. If this Luddite behavior keeps up, we'll be like Irish citizens who have to take a trip to England for an aborition without getting arrested. But, in this case, it'll be to send our aging parents to get a new lung, liver, kidney, spinal-cord repair, brain tissue repair, ocular replacements...etc. I wonder where all the exciting medical treatments and research of the future will be held, in the U.S., or in countries who were technically behind us only a few decades ago?

    = 9J =

  24. No. People already get donor organs. Its blood etc by rufusdufus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    First off, DNA evidence is based on bodily fluids which will still have the persons real DNA. Secondly, DNA evidence can only be legitimately used to clear the innocent, not prove guilt. DNA tests are not 100% identifying, but can be used to say that a particular sample does not match. This is a very important distinction when the population is large, which, in fact, it is.
    Thus even if part of your cloned kidney somehow ended up at a crime scene, it would only fail to remove you from the pool of suspects. Other correlating evidence would be needed to establish guilt.

  25. Re:Weak argument by tumbaumba · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The human research conducted by Nazi Germany could "save lives"...

    Actually some results of Nazi's experimentation on humans are used in modern medicine. For example hypothermia data collected while freezing people to death. I don't think we should discard such knowledge, but neither should we pursue this path.

  26. Re:Scientific, but arbitrary by GenSolo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm just curious, but would you agree to the killing of a person in the midst of a stroke? Their brain functions cease (in some cases), but they haven't ceased permanently (well, not always). An embryo who has yet to have brain functions but will someday is therefore, by your definition, not "dead" because the cessation of brain function is again not permanent. Just food for thought, so to speak.