Oddly, there is very little notice of the confirmation that Advance Cell Technology has created cloned human embryos. Current bioethics and science reporting evidently takes the creation and destruction of human embryos for granted. In fact, the embryonic humans were created with the intention of destroying them.
No one – or almost no one – seems to notice.
Wired Science has one of the few reports that narrows in on what should be the headline:”Research Breakthrough: Human Clones May Be Genetically Viable.”
It is significant that (as reported earlier) human-animal hybrid embryos do not appear to be a practical source for human embryonic stem cells. However, after reading the article itself, it appears that the story with in the story may be – I believe should be – even more significant.
The article, “Reprogramming of Human Somatic Cells Using Human and Animal Oocytes,” is available online and free, here, in pdf form. Supplemental information is available here.
Lanza and his colleagues report that they used human eggs and human donor DNA to create about 50 cloned human embryos, all females. They also write that they used a human embryo started by in vitro fertilization as a “control,” or material to test the validity of their other results.
Cells were removed for testing from some of the cloned human embryos and the IVF human embryo. Other than that, we do not know the fate of these embryonic human girls.
Edited January 27, 2010 to correct a “Label” typo
