By Xinhua
Beijing : Scientists at a small California company claimed they have created the first mature cloned human embryos from single skin cells taken from adults, according to a report in the journal Stem Cells as quoted by media Friday.
Stemagen, a private company set up by an unnamed investor and a top fertility doctor, said its scientists used cloning technology to make five early-stage embryos from donated human eggs and skin cells from two men.
No one knew if those embryos were healthy enough to grow into babies. But the study leader, who is also the medical director of a fertility clinic, said they looked robust, even as he emphasized that he has no interest in cloning people.
Dr. Samuel Wood of the research team said stem cells are his business plan. “We believe that this is the future — to create patient-specific stem cells,” Wood said.
They used a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT, which involves hollowing out an egg cell and injecting the nucleus of a cell from the donor to be copied. It is the same technique used to make Dolly the sheep in 1996.
In 2004, Korean scientist Hwang woo-suk at Seoul National University announced in the journal Science that his team had cloned human embryos and had gotten stem cells to grow from them, which turned out to be a lie.
The California group was very cautious in presenting the evidence in its just-released paper. Scientists checked the DNA carefully in the donor cells from which DNA was taken and in the embryos which was cloned from that DNA to make sure it was the same. And they had an independent laboratory confirm the result.
However, other experts were skeptical about the claims. If verified, the team would be the first to prove it has cloned human beings as a source of stem cells, the master cells of the body.