Cloning pioneer abandons human embryo work - November 19, 2007
There was much excitement last week over the news that cloning pioneer Ian Wilmut is to abandon human embryo work. Wilmut thinks a new technique using skin cells is the future.
“We’ve not made this decision because it's ethically better” Wilmut told the BBC. “To me it’s always been ethically acceptable to think that if you could use cells from a human embryo to develop a treatment for a disease like motor neurone disease, for which there is no treatment at present, then that is an acceptable thing to do.”
Wilmut, who famously cloned Dolly the sheep, told the Telegraph he plans to abandon nuclear transfer in favour of the new method pioneered by Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University. The Telegraph did a massive story on this, along with a profile of Wilmut, and it was subsequently followed up by the BBC and a number of other sources, many claiming this is the end of ‘therapeutic cloning’, which inserts DNA into unfertilised eggs.
Yamanaka’s work transforms mouse skin cells into cells virtually identical to embryonic stem cells (see Nature Reports Stem Cells article and interview with him). Skin cells were also in the news last week due to a breakthrough that saw them used to create cloned primate embryos and, from these, embryonic stem-cell lines (Nature).