In The Field
Interspecies cloning at SSR
Akiko Yabuuchi from George Daley’s lab at Children’s Hospital of Boston reported on using somatic cell nuclear transfer to reprogram human nuclei (Daley’s in fact) in bovine egg cells at the Society for the Study of Reproduction meeting in Kona, today. Interspecies nuclear transfer is highly controversial, so it wasn’t exactly surprising that one of Yabuuchi’s first slides mentioned that the project has approval from the Institutional Review Boards and Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight committees at Brigham and Women’s and Children’s Hospital where the work was carried out. The efficiency wasn’t very high, but the hybrid embryos were able to undergo cleavage and correct segregation of the human chromosomes.