Scientists take a giant step forward in human cloning
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 20/05/2005)
The first cloned human embryos to be created in Britain - and the first to be grown in the West - were unveiled by scientists yesterday.
The news that a team at the Centre for Life, in Newcastle upon Tyne, had created three human clones, the most advanced being a female five-day-old embryo the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence, was announced as a South Korean team disclosed a much more significant milestone.
A three-day-old cloned human embryo created in Newcastle
To the dismay of opponents of such research, the Koreans have succeeded in the efficient creation of more than 30 cloned human embryos - regardless of the age, sex and infirmity of the person being cloned. They then dismantled the embryos to grow the first lines of patient-specific embryonic cells.
This marks the start of what many scientists believe will be a revolution in medicine.
The embryonic stem cells were created from patients with spinal cord injury, juvenile diabetes and immune deficiency. In the short term, these will lead to laboratory studies designed to help understand the basics of human development and these ailments. In the long term, they will pave the way to a range of new treatments.
The advance, announced in the journal Science today, puts the Koreans about two years ahead of Prof Alison Murdoch, Dr Miodrag Stojkovic and Dr Majlinda Lako in Newcastle. It underlines the urgency of efforts by the biotech entrepreneur Sir Chris Evans to set up a British foundation to raise hundreds of millions of pounds for research.
Prof Murdoch and Dr Stojkovic paid tribute to the "excellent, impressive and historic" Korean work, which proves the concept of therapeutic cloning.
Sir Chris said: "Countries are forging ahead whilst we ponder our greatness in this field. I still believe we can be the best and lead the world in this field if we move fast and decisively."
Although the Newcastle team had hoped to use some of the 2,000 eggs that are left over annually from IVF at Newcastle's NHS fertility centre, the Korean study and Newcastle's preliminary work with 36 eggs shows that only eggs less than an hour old are good enough for cloning - a significant constraint.
The British team created its clones by reprogramming eggs with embryonic cells and now plans to use adult cells taken from a diabetic.
Its efforts were being conducted "on a shoestring budget", Prof Murdoch said: while Dr Stojkovic has one post-doctoral student, the Korean team is about 25 strong.
Last year Prof Woo Suk Hwang and colleagues from Seoul National University made history when they announced to the American Association for the Advancement of Science the first successful cloning of human embryos.
Their new work shows an efficient way to create cloned embryos so that they can be dismantled for their stem cells - parent cells that can turn into any of the 200-plus types in the body.
Speaking at the Royal Institution in London yesterday, Prof Hwang said his work contained several "major breakthroughs" that brought stem cell treatments "a step forward".
Although the team denies that the work brings cloned babies any closer - that is not the aim of the project - many of the insights described in today's paper would aid maverick scientists who wanted to do so.
"Reproductive cloning is unsafe and unethical," Prof Hwang emphasised. He said that cloned animals had experienced a range of problems, so, "regardless of cruel hoaxes, scientific evidence should further dispirit reckless notions regarding human reproductive cloning".
Prof Murdoch said that scientists were "a long way off" being able to clone a baby safely.
Prof Gerald Schatten, of the University of Pittsburgh, and co-author of the Science research, said that Prof Hwang and his colleagues had made "astonishing progress" in only a year.
"Stem cells can be made that are specific to patients regardless of age or sex and these cells are identical genetic matches to the donor," he said. "If they can be safely used in transplant, the promise for effective treatment, perhaps even cure, of devastating diseases and injuries comes within reach."
But he cautioned against "hyping the clinical utility", as much more work was needed before stem cells could be used on patients.
"If the safety and efficacy cannot be shown in an animal model, maybe never," he said.
