Archive by category | Cloning

New York stem cell committee approves payments for eggs

Cross-posted from the Great Beyond The New York Empire State Stem Cell Board (ESSCB) has approved the use of state funds to compensate women who donate eggs for embryonic stem cell research. The board, which implements New York’s $600 million stem cell research initiative, reached the decision on 11 June. Board members noted that taxpayer funds are already used to compensate some egg donors in state-subsidized in vitro fertilization programs. They also emphasized that researchers in other states that do not allow payment for eggs – including Massachusetts and California — have largely failed to recruit donors. Nevertheless, the decision  … Read more

Cloning by reprogramming?

“Now we have the technology that can make a cloned child” reads the headline of the most-read article in the Independent right now. But the article does not actually break any news, nor does it use the common method of cloning; rather it discusses a well-understood implication of that recent reprogramming breakthroughs might yield yet another weird way of making a baby.  Read more

Former head of Bush council on bioethics says make embryos for research–in five years

The former head of President Bush’s council on bioethics, now says there shouldn’t be a ban against cloning human embryos for research. Instead, there should be a five-year moratorium against the process. Writing in the Weekly Standard, Leon Kass decries the fact that the US Congress did not pass a law blocking all forms of human cloning, and then says that this stricter form of the law is unnecessary now that researchers can turn to alternate ways of reprogramming.  Read more

Techniques for making stem cells from cloned and biopsied human embryos inch forward

An article at News at Nature today describes an advance in making human embryonic stem cells through nuclear transfer, or therapeutic cloning. Also, this month, a separate article describes making human embryonic stem cells by taking cells from embryos without destroying them.  Read more

Human reprogramming changes everything, and nothing

That’s a paraphrase of what James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told reporters at a press conference this morning when he announced that he’d induced human skin cells to take on the trappings of embryonic stem cells. His work is published online today in Science. Tying (or narrowly beating) Thomson is Kyoto University’s Shinya Yamanaka who reports his accomplishment in Cell. A news article from Nature is available here.  Read more

American monkey stem-cell work heading to UK humans

This week, Nature released a paper reporting the first embryonic stem cells made from an embryo cloned from an adult monkey. Next week, researchers in the UK hope to try the same thing with humans. The Oregon-based monkey team needed just over 300 monkey oocytes to make two monkey embryonic stem cell lines. The researchers at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne expect to have twice that number of freshly collected oocytes from women seeking fertility treatments.  Read more

Britain gives go-ahead on chimeras. Will science now block the way?

Today, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) in the UK said that scientists could combine human chromosomes with animal eggs and try to make embryonic stem cells. It’s easier to collect unfertilized eggs from, say, cows than it is to collect them from women.  Read more