Cloning License for Dolly's Doc

Rollie Hawk writes "Ian Wilmut, leader of Dolly the sheep's team and Professor at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, has been given the green light by the British government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to start further cloning research. As a matter of fact, he is now a licensed human cloner. The license has a duration of one year and is the second of its kind given by Britain, the first country to officially sanction human cloning research. Research will be focusing on motor neurone disease (MND). The team hopes to perform cell nuclear replacement on the skin cells of MND victims in order to create stem cells, the jack-of-all-trades of the cell family and the supposed magic bullets for ailments ranging from Alzheimer's to paralysis.

Comments

Re:So.....

[jacob_jackson]

Last August, a team of scientists from Newcastle University in northern England was granted a license to clone human embryos to develop new treatments for diabetes and degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's (http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=hea lthNews&storyID=7569803&pageNumber=1)

Re:Certainty

[jackelfish]

They are not creating embryos, they are attempting to create pluripotent cells, from skin cells, in an attempt to replace malfunctioning neurons. There is not an entire organism involved here as they are not using gametes (eggs or sperm) in these experiments. This is where the term "cloning" becomes confused, in that many people think it always refers to the duplication of a whole organism (such as Dolly) where it simply means to insert foreign DNA into a cell.

Not so fast Einstein

[KarmaBlackballed]

But when you *clone* something, everyone screams, think about our children, when it is really totally harmless

I don't have any answers, but feel compelled to point out that so far cloning is not known to be harmless. Specifically, as far as I know all cloned mammals have a cell age equivalent to that of the cell donor. The cell age is measured by the length of the cell telemers. (When the telemers become too short, the cell dies. Telemers get shorter with every cell division.)