Clone Embros Essay Example For Students

Clone Embros Essay #1Abstract: News of the cloned embryos immediately inflamed the debate over the ethics of human cloning. Advanced Cell Technology, a privately held company, is trying to patent its cloning technology as part oits for-profit ventures. But critics, particularly the Catholic church and anti-abortion groups, say such a business would immorally destroy thousands of human embryos.In parthenogenesis, an egg cell is treated with chemicals that cause it to start dividing into an embryo without fertilization by sperm. Advanced Cell Technology exposed 22 human eggs to those chemicals. After five days,six eggs had matured into blastocysts, a spherical structure that is a landmark in the early life of an embryo. Scientists believe embryos created this way could mature long enough to be useful in medical treatment butwould be unable to grow to term. Both the cloned and parthenogenetically produced embryos had significant shortcomings. None developed stem cells, which can grow into any type of cell or tissue of the body. Advanced Cell Technology needs stem cells to produce medical treatments for patients. (Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times 2001 Allrights reserved)Full Text: A Massachusetts company announced Sunday that it had created cloned human embryos that were able to survive for several days, raising fears that someone could produce a cloned baby and rekindling debate on whether Congress should ban the procedure. Advanced Cell Technology Inc. has no plans to produce cloned children, it said, but instead aims to use cloning to make new cells and tissues for people with diabetes, Parkinsons disease and other ailments. The research, however, remains many steps short of what would be needed to create eithera cloned baby or human tissue for medical treatment. Still, it marks the first report in a scientific journal of a successful attempt to clone human life. A Korean team claimed in 1998 that it had produced a cloned human embryo, but the research was never published orconfirmed. Michael West, chief executive of Advanced Cell Technology, said the work represented the first halting steps toward a new era of medicine in which disease would be cured by swapping a persons faulty cells and tissues for new ones. It looks like this is going to be possible, but this is obviously only a preliminary report, West said in an interview. He said his team published early results because it wanted to remain transparent about its research amid the sweeping ethical debate over cloning. The research, which required no federal approval, appears in e- biomed: The Journal of Regenerative Medicine, a relatively new online publication. Scientific findings generally do not win credibility until they are published in a journal that subjects the data to review by other researchers. William Haseltine, editor of the journal and chairman of Human Genome Sciences Inc., a leading biotechnology company, said the cloning data were scrutinized by independent scientists with the same rigor that is used at traditionaljournals.News of the cloned embryos immediately inflamed the debate over the ethics of human cloning. Advanced Cell Technology, a privately held company, is trying to patent its cloning technology as part of its for-profit ventures. But critics, particularly the Catholic church and anti-abortion groups,say such a business would immorally destroy thousands of human embryos. This corporation is creating human embryos for the sole purpose of killing them and harvesting their cells. Unless Congress acts quickly, this corporation and others will be opening human embryo farms, said Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee. Some critics say the company is hastening the arrival of cloned children, a prospect that they believe society has not fully considered or regulated. As the company continues to publish its research, these critics say, someone could eventually use it to create a cloned embryo and grow it to term in a surrogate mother.In a bipartisan vote in July, the House approved broad legislation that would criminalize cloning both as a way to produce children and as a medical tool. If the measure had already been law, West and his colleagues could be subject to jail terms of up to 10 years and $1 million in fines for the work they announced Sunday. The Senate plans to take up the measure in February or March. Cloning critics said lawmakers should move sooner. This is among the issues pushed to the back burner, or perhaps behind the stove entirely, by the events of Sept. 11, said Richard Doerflinger, an official with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which opposes human cloning for any purpose. The Senate has been acting as though thisis something way down the road that we can think about when were done with terrorism. . . . But this announcement is a wake-up call that we have to deal with the ethical and social and legal ramifications of cloning right away. Prospects for the legislation are unclear in the Senate. Although there is widespread support for barring the cloning of children, some senators seem uncertain whether they want to outlaw a medical technique that might save lives. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said Sunday that he supported cloning for research purposes. Still, he said the Advanced Cell Technology experiments were disconcerting. I think its going in the wrong direction, Daschle said on Fox News Sunday. The Senate sponsor of a broad anti-cloning measure, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), called for Congress to swiftly pass a six-month moratorium on all human cloning until the Senate can take up the issue more fully.President Bush has criticized human cloning and praised the House ban.In its research, the Massachusetts company used two techniques to produce human embryoscloning and a second process called parthenogenesis.In traditional reproduction, genes carried in the sperm and egg co-mingle to produce an offspring that has a unique mix of its parents qualities.Both of the Advanced Cell methods, by contrast, created embryos that were genetic copies of only one parent.The company obtained egg cells from seven female volunteers. It stri pped the DNA from 19 egg cells and replaced it with genetic material from another person, also a volunteer solicited by the company. The new genetic materialcame from either a skin cell or ovarian material called a cumulus cell. Seven of the eggs began to divide and grow. These early embryos were clonesoffspring that carried genes from only one adult, the person who had donated the skin or cumulus cell. Two of them divided into four-celled embryos and one developed six cells before the growth stopped. The growth occurred over a three- day period.West said the embryos were no longer viable and had been disassembled so that their cells could be studied. In parthenogenesis, an egg cell is treated with chemicals that cause it to start dividing into an embryo without fertilization by sperm. Advanced Cell Technology exposed 22 human eggs to those chemicals. After five days, six eggs had matured into blastocysts, a spherical structure that is a landmark in the early life of an embryo. Scientists believe embryos created this way could mature long enough to be useful in medical treatment but would be unable to grow to term. Both the cloned and parthenogenetically produced embryos had significant shortcomings. None developed stem cells, which can grow into any type of cell or tissue of the body. Advanced Cell Technology needs stem cells to produce medical treatments for patients. A wide array of researchers is trying to understand how stem cells grow into other cell types, such as insulin-producing cells for diabetics.Researchers may face a significant hurdle even if they can produce tissues from stem cells for human transplant. The patients might reject the newtissue as a foreign substance. Advanced Cell Technology and a small group of other private companies say cloning could produce tissues that match the genetic makeup of individual patients. This tissue might be more readily accepted by the patients body.Our dream is that someday we could take a patients cell, skin cell,and give them back anything that they needed to cure disease, West said Sunday on NBCs Meet the Press.Some critics said Advanced Cell Technologys work, so far, is a failure,not a triumph. It seems that if you take eggs and dont develop them beyondthree days, they dont have success, said Alexander Capron, a USC professorof law and medicine. He said the experiments also failed to show that cloned human embryos are free of genetic defects, a point that the company itself acknowledged. Caption: PHOTO: Our intention is not to create cloned human beings, wrote Dr. Robert Lanza, a researcher with Advanced Cell Technology.; PHOTOGRAPHER:ReutersCredit: TIMES STAFF WRITERReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission. =============================== End of Document ================================The following article has been sent by a user at SANTA BARBARA CITY COLLEGE via Proquest, an information service of the ProQuest CompanyThe First Clone ; Scientists have finally cloned a human embryo. The breakthroughpromises cures for terrible diseases. Heres the inside story:#2Abstract:Robert Lanza, Michael West, and Jose Cibelli have finally cloned a human embryo, and many claim that this scientific breakthrough could produce cures for diseases like diabetes and for the ravages of aging. Lanza, West, and Cibelli are profiled, and their belief in human therapeutic cloning is discussed. Copyright U.S. News and World Report Dec 3, 2001Full Text: Physically, Judson Somerville didnt feel a thing. When he took the cigar-cutter-like tool and clipped a chunk of skin cells from his right calf last April, there was no pain. The 40-year-old Texas physician hasbeen using a wheelchair for years, paralyzed from the chest down, the result of a terrible cycling accident. But emotionally, that was another story. Cutting the skin from his calf, Somerville says, he felt the thrill ofbeing a sort of astronaut, a pioneer. By donating his skin cells, Somerville was volunteering for nothing less than service on the frontier of human cloning. Somerville did not make the decision lightly. As a conservative Republican, a longtime contributor to President Bush, Somerville knows how controversial cloning is for many of his political compatriots. Buthe is also a devout Episcopalian. After consulting with his church leaders, Somerville concluded that being one of the first humans to be clonednot to produce a baby, which he would never do, but to create healthy new cells for ailing patientswould be one of the best things he could do for his fellow man. His decision wasnt completely selfless, however. Neurons derived from his own cloned embryo could end Somervilles paralysis. My 14-year- old daughter doesnt want me getting her wedding gown caught up in my wheelchair, he says, laughing. So when the day comes, shes counting on me walking her down the aisle. Now, Somerville may be a step closer to that walk, and humanity is moving into uncharted medical and ethical territory. Since the 1997 announcement of the cloned sheep Dolly, scientists around the world have been trying to duplicate and advance the work in a variety of species from mice to monkeys. Some have succeeded, but many more have been thwarted in their efforts. A few researchers had even set out to clone humans, without success. But this week, scientists at Advanced Cell Technology, a small biotechstart-up company in Worcester, Mass., are announcing that they have done just thatsuccessfully engineered the worlds first cloned human embryo. ACT is the only laboratory on U.S. soil that has acknowledged working on human therapeutic cloning. But other than being called to testify before Congress on these issues, the companys leadership and its scientists have not publicly elaborated on their human-cloning effortsuntil now. Over the past 18 months, U.S. News has reported from inside the ACT laboratory, with exclusive access to the cloning scientists and their laboratory work. In a highly technical paper in the Journal of Regenerative Medicine, the sci entists now describe their laboratory successthe transfer of human DNA into human eggs and the growth of those eggs into six-cell embryos. What that scientific paper doesnt describe, and what U.S. News documents here, is what went on in the hearts and minds of the people behind this achievement and the many setbacks and adjustments that preceded the final success. The accomplishment presents huge challenges to every premise of scientific, religious, and legal thought. Given the intensity of last summers national debate over human embryonic stem cell research, ACTs work is sure to become a lightning rod for conservative critics when the issue is taken up again in the months ahead. It will be condemned as an ethical abomination akin to playing God and described as the creation of embryos for spare parts. It will also be hailed as the hugest medical breakthrough of the past halfcenturyan accomplishment that could cure many diseases of aging and provides hope for people like Somerville. The story of ACTs breakthrough is largely the story of three men, from very different backgrounds, who came together to stake their scientific careers on this controversial enterprise. Heres how, against the odds,they pushed the world into the age of cloning: The instigator Jose Cibellis ambitions started out simply enough. Raised on the Pampas of Argentina, the talented young researcher just wanted to do something for the farmers. So after obtaining his degree in veterinary medicine, he married his high school sweetheart and headed to the University of Massachusetts-Amherstto get his Ph.D. There he quickly became a star student in the lab of James Robl, who was doing work on so-called transgenic animalscattle, for example, with improved genetic properties that yield higher-quality meat or milk. By the summer of 1996, Cibelli was on the fast track to becoming a majorplayer in agricultural genetics. But a Massachusetts Institute of Technology conference on cell therapies changed his life. Researchers there were presenting disappointing results in an experimental technique to cure Parkinsons disease in humans. Young, healthy fetal cells were injected into the damaged parts of patients brains. But little long-term improvement had been seen. In the car on his way home that evening, Cibelli could not shake a nagging thought: Of course the cells didnt work so well. They werent the patients own cells. Working under Robl, Cibelli had already joined Advanced Cell Technology to focus on cloning prime specimens of cattle. If you could reproduce a cows cells, Cibelli reasoned, you could use the same method to endlessly multiply a given patients cells to replace any of those in the body that were worn out or diseased. In an instant, Cibelli saw the future of medicine. Therapeutic cloning for humansbecame his calling.There were obstacles, though. One was the scarcity of human eggs from women willing to donate them for experiments. But, Cibelli surmised, if you removed the DNA from a more readily available egg say, from a cowsit might be possible that the proteins and enzymes left would be the sameones that rejuvenate and multiply cells in humans. To find out, he scraped cells from the inside of his cheek. He grew the cells in a culture, then inserted their DNA into a cow egg that had been rid of its bovine genetic code. Most researchers were skeptical. Cibelli had his own doubts, too. But so often, people give up and declare something impossible after 800 tries, he says. When on the 900th try they would have figured out how to make it work. Cibelli kept at it. After implanting cow eggs with his own DNA over and over again, he and Robl were about to toss yet another petri dish full of failed cloning attempts when they spied a rudimentary embryo. It was a round ball containing a cluster of stem cells, the primordial body cells that are capable of becoming skin, liver, nervesand every other cell in the body. The news spread fast in the biomedical community. Cibelli couldnt reproduce the results, and he abandoned the use of cow eggs as a dead end. But the feat captured the attention of the man who would play a key role in making Cibellis dream a reality. The visionary Michael West by his own admission, is an absolute obsessive- compulsivewho views life as a mission. A self-described political conservative, he was in his early years a creationist, and he trained as a paleontologist with the goal of proving the Bibles account of Gods design. But as hestudied the fossil record, instead of finding Gods divine plan, he found an endless account of disease and suffering. Out of that bleak vision he developed a new spiritual fervor: If God is about love and life, he says now, then we should do everything we can to end suffering and death. So in his early 20s, West knew his holy grail: to conquer aging and deatha goal so stunning in its scope that many colleagues over the years have discounted him as a quixotic dreamer. When I talk about ending aging, Im not talking about some vain fountain of youth, he explains. Im talking about ending the suffering of aging: macular degeneration, cancer, Alzheimers, heart disease. After getting his Ph.D. i n biology, West enrolled in medical school but was too impatient with the establishment to finish. Instead, he reincorporated his late fathers truck-leasing business as a biotech firm called Geron (Greek for old man), committed to ending the ravages of aging. Enchantedby findings that each body cell has an ever shortening fuse called a telomere that signals a cell to age and die, West poured all his energies into finding a way to keep extending the fuse to give a cell endless life. It took seven years, but his company did eventually identify telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes telomeres. (And he ended up marrying the Geron scientist who cloned the gene for telomerase.) Telomerase alone proved not to be enough to reverse aging, and West became fascinated with work on newly discovered stem cells. West immediately recognized that stem cells had the potential to rejuvenate aging bodies, and he quickly began funding scientists who ended up isolating the firsthuman stem c ells. But a s Geron grew, its board became more and more uneasy with Wests controversial interests, and West despaired at the companys lack of support for his vision. In early 1998, he left the company he had founded and lost access to the intellectual property he had created on telomerase and humanstem cells. It wasnt long, though, before West caught wind of Cibellis cloning feats, and he immediately seized on the concept as one far superior to producing generic stem cells. (Generic stem cells, derived from humanembryos, are the kind that President Bush agonized so publicly over last summer before deciding to fund limited research on the cells.) But, West wondered, why would you treat patients with cells from an embryo donated from an in vitro fertilization clinic with another persons cellswhen you could give patients their very own cells? In a flash, West was in talks with Advanced Cell Technologyat that time an agricultural genetics companyand within the year became CEO, then owner of the v enture. Both Cibelli and West knew from the start that they would need to race to form useful therapies before controversy overshadowed their efforts. Because no new treatments can be given to humans without first being tested in animals, Cibelli and West needed someone with connections in the researchworld who could get those studies up and running right away. As it turned out, that person was working just a mile or so down the road. The activist Robert Lanza is the living embodiment of the character played by Matt Damon in the movie Good Will Hunting. Growing up underprivileged in Stoughton, Mass., south of Boston, the young preteen caught the attention of Harvard Medical School researchers when he showed up on the university steps having successfully altered the genetics of chickens in his basement. Over the next decade, he was to be discovered and taken under the wing of scientific giants such as psychologist B. F. Skinner, immunologist Jonas Salk, and heart transplant pioneer Christia an Barnard. His mentors described himas a genius, a renegade thinker, even likening him to Einstein. With a gift for enticing the worlds top inds, Lanza managed as a medical student to extract essays from the likes of C. Everett Koop, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and Linus Pauling, which he compiled into a book sounding warning bells about the declining chances for health and survival of the species over the coming century. Lanza focused his laserlike intellect on transplant medicine and tissue engineering. For 20 years, he worked to cure diseases such as diabetes and leukemia through infusions of new cells and organs from donors. But for 20 years, I hit my head against the same thing over and over againrejection, rejection, rejection, says Lanza. Using strong drugs to prevent patients immune systems from attacking the foreign cells, Lanza says, the cure wasoften worse than the disease. Even with the drugs, I watched too many children have first their fingers amputated, then their hands, then their arms. When Lanza discovered that it might be possible to clone a patients own cells, he felt that he finally had the solution hed spent decades searching for, and in March 1999 he signed on as Advanced Cell Technologys director of medical research. Integrity EssayBUT that first step would inevitably lead to a second and a third, raising questions about who else should be granted permission to clone. Single mothers? Old people? Gay people? Professor Robertsons plan is to deal with that later, but another ethicist, Prof. Gregory Pence of the University of Alabama, would open the door to everyone.As far as I can see, Professor Pence said, there is absolutely noConstitutional basis for the government to tell you how you can originate children. If you decide to replicate Uncle Harry because he was brilliant and funny and lived until 90, I dont see why somebody shouldnt be able to do it as long as its safe. That view, however, is unlikely to hold sway with Congress. In July, the House of Representatives approved, by a broad margin, a bill that would make any type of cloning, including so-called therapeutic cloning for research, a crime. President Bush supports the bill, and as the Senate prepares to consider it, the biotechnology i ndustry has come out against human cloning, apparently calculating that in doing so, it can preserve its research. At least one senator thinks this strategy will work. I predict that Congresswill ban reproductive cloning, and Im all for it, Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said. If senators felt comfortable that there was a good solid iron door against reproductive cloning, then I believe you will open the door for scientists to move ahead with these therapies. In any case, not many people really want to clone Uncle Harry, or even themselves. Pamela Madsen, executive director of the American Infertility Association, a patient advocacy group, said most couples prefer that magic mix of him and her even if the mix comes from donated egg or sperm. And for those who are not infertile, having babies is simply more fun, and cheaper, the old-fashioned way. Ms. Madsens group has issued a statement opposing human cloning, not for philosophical reasons, but on the groundthat it is not safe. But she wonders if, decades from now, those looking back on all the noise and passion of the cloning controversy will find it all silly. Ever since I have been a child, what was considered impossible or immoral or unimaginable by some has become a part of regular life, she said. Think about when we first started to do blood transfusions, or organ transplants and, yes, Louise Brown the first baby born by in-vitro fertilization. Every time we have made a leap that has benefited mankind, it has always been with a loud voice behind us saying, Youd better watch out. Captioned as: Girls using a mirror to perfect their form in a dance class in a poor Rio de Janeiro neighborhood. (Associated Press) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission. =============================== End of Document ================================The following article has been sent by a user at SANTA BARBARA CITY COLLEGE via Proquest, an information service of the ProQuest CompanyHuman-Cloning Firm Received Federal Aid; Biotechnology: A $1.8- milliongrant awarded before disclosure of the controversial research. Home EditionThe Los Angeles Times# 5SEE CORRECTION APPENDED; Biotech companiesA story in Thursdays Business misstated the size of ImClone Systems potential stake in Advanced Cell Technology, which resulted in an erroneous estimate of Advanced Cells market value. ImClone may convert its $1-million investment for an equity stake of just more than 3%. That would give Advanced Cell a market capitalizationof about $30.7 million. The story also misidentified Miller Quarles. The retired Texas oilman was an early investor in Advanced Cell but does notown a controlling stake. Under Michael Wests leadership, the company has pushed itself to the forefront of human cloning. But animal cloning remains its chief businessthough it has produced little, if any, profit. Advanced Cell made a considerable investment in the business this year when it acquired a Pennsylvania dairy breeding company. But dairy farmers are a tough sell; they want betteranimals, not clones, said John Meyer, chief executive of the Holstein Assn. USA. What Advanced Cell may lack in business success it has in media savvy. It assured itself a splash with its human cloning experiment by simultaneously publishing an West and his co-authors on the Scientific American piece called their own account in Scientific American and granting an exclusive to U.S. News and World Report. To be sure no one missed the significance,work the dawn of a new age in medicine that showed therapeutic cloningis within reach.Advanced Cell said it isnt interested in helping couples clone offspring. The firm said it cre ated clones to extract stem cells, which can turn into any type of tissue and can be used to treat diseases such as diabetes. In Scientific American, however, West and his co-authors left the door to reproductive cloning ajar, a decision likely to inflame controversy. Due to potential health risks, they wrote, reproductive cloning is unwarranted at this time and should be restricted until the safety and ethical issuessurrounding it are resolved.(Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times 2001 Allrightsreserved)Full Text:SEE CORRECTION APPENDED; Biotech companiesA story in Thursdays Businessmisstated the size of ImClone Systems potential stake in Advanced Cell Technology, which resulted in an erroneous estimate of Advanced Cells market value. ImClone may convert its $1-million investment for an equity stake of just more than 3%. That would give Advanced Cell a market capitalizationof about $30.7 million. The story also misidentified Miller Quarles. The retired Texas oilma n was an early investor in Advanced Cell but does not own a controlling stake. The Massachusetts company condemned by the Bush administration for its efforts to clone a human embryo received a federal grant last month to conduct biotechnology research. Advanced Cell Technologys human cloning experiments set off a national controversy this week that is renewing demands that Congress ban all cloning of human cells. But before the cloning experiment was disclosed, the company was awarded $1.8 million under a Commerce Department program intended to accelerate research and development in private companies, said Michael Baum, a CommerceDepartment spokesman. The company said Wednesday that the grant would not be used for any human cloning research. Rather, the money is to fund experiments into reprogramming adult human cells in an effort to develop therapies for diseases. Both the adult cell research and the human cloning experiments are part of an effort by the companywhose main revenue source has been cloning cowsto break into the business of disease therapy. Thus, the federal funding represents an important capital infusion for the small company. But researchers and industry officials say administering such grants and keeping salaries, equipment and other expenses separate is a difficult accounting chore. It is one reason some universities that receive federal funds have moved embryonic research off campus, avoiding any potential for conflicts with allowable work under such grants. The Commerce Department issued the grant under its Advanced Technology Program. Baum said the terms of the grant specifically forbid the company from using the federal money to conduct research on human cloning. We have audit procedures in place to make sure that doesnt happen, Baum said. The biotechnology start-up reignited a furor over cloning this week when an online science journal published an account of the companys experiment. The article in e-Biomed: The Journal of Regenerative Medicine said that the company created only a few clones, that all died and none consistedof more than six cells. President Bush condemned the experiment and Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, vowed to push for a six-month ban on human cloning while lawmakes consider legislation calling for a total ban. The House passed legislation banning human cloning in July, but it moved to the back burner after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. As a privately held company, Advanced Cell has disclosed little about its finances. According to information posted on its Internet site, it has $6 million available for agricultural research. Also, the company disclosed in 1997 a five-year, $10-million collaboration with Genzyme Transgenics, a biotechnology company. But within the last six months, Advanced Cell sold a New York biotechnology company about a 7% stake for $1 million. The deal with ImClone Systems, which includes a research collaboration, gives Advanced Cell an estimated market value of $14.3 million.ImClone Chief Executive Sam Waskal said Advanced Cell, like many start-ups, sold ImClone convertible preferred stock because it needed investment capital. This is significant to them, he said. Advanced Cell wouldnt comment on its finances. Michael West, president and chief executive, was in meetings and not available, a spokeswoman said. A vice president said he could not provide details, but reiterated that only private funds from venture capitalists and individual investors are used to support human cloning projects.There were no research grants at all on this, obviously, said Dr. Robert Lanza, vice president for medical and scientific development. Details of the federal grant are posted on the Internet sites of the Commerce Department and Advanced Cell, but have attracted little notice.Founded in 1994, Advanced Cell is a spinoff of a chicken-breeding operation called Avian Farms. The company had hoped to bioengineer chickens using cloning techniques developed at the University of Massachusetts. West, who joined Advanced Cell in 1998, and New York venture capitalist iller Quarles took control of the company last year, after a Boston bank initiated foreclosure proceedings against some Avian Farms properties tocollect a $3-million debt. Terms of the transaction werent disclosed. Under Wests leadership, the company has pushed itself to the forefront of human cloning. But animal cloning remains its chief businessthough it has produced little, if any, profit. Advanced Cell made a considerable investment in the business this year when it acquired a Pennsylvania dairy breeding company. But dairy farmers are a tough sell; they want betteranimals, not clones, said John Meyer, chief executive of the Holstein Assn. USA. What Advanced Cell may lack in business success it has in media savvy. It assured itself a splash with its human cloning experiment by simultaneouslypublishing an account in Scientific American and granting an exclusive to U.S. News and World Report. To be sure no one missed the significance, West and his co-authors on the Scientific American piece called their own work the dawn of a new age in medicine that showed therapeutic cloning is within reach. In the days since, Advanced Cell executives have made the rounds of morning talk shows and media eve nts. According to his assistant, West has been booked solid for three daysraising questions among people in the scientific community as to whether the company hopes to use the publicity to attract investors. Advanced Cell said it isnt interested in helping couples clone offspring. The firm said it created clones to extract stem cells, which can turn into any type of tissue and can be used to treat diseases such as diabetes. In Scientific American, however, West and his co-authors left the door to reproductive cloning ajar, a decision likely to inflame controversy. Due to potential health risks, they wrote, reproductive cloning is unwarranted at this time and should be restricted until the safety and ethical issues surrounding it are resolved. Research to be covered by the federal grant takes Advanced Cell down another scientific path. The company proposes to reprogram an adult cell, such as a skin cell, into a functioning nerve cell. That cell could be used to treat such ailments as Parkinsons disease, in which cells in the brain do not produce enough of the key neurological chemical dopamine. Baum, of the governments Advanced Technology Program, said the company hopes to transform the cells by dousing them with chemicals in a process that does not involve cloning or the use of embryonic stem cell tissue,which, with limited exceptions, also is under a federal funding ban. Other companies and institutions are racing to understand how cells program themselves, so they can produce cell therapies without using embryos. Message No: 94915=============================== End of Document ================================#7Abstract:For Advanced Cell Technology, these uncertainties loom large. The company is betting that it can perfect human cloning, creating embryos not for reproductive purposes but as a source of stem cells. Human embryonic stem cells could, in theory, grow into any of the bodys tissues and organs, and the company wants to provide them as replacement cells to patients suffering from any of a wide variety of diseases. The company tried to clone with two types of adult cells: skin cells and cumulus cells, which are cells that cling to human eggs. The researchers added skin cells to 11 eggs; none divided even once. They added cumulus cells to eight eggs; three divided once or twice, the others not at all. Stem cells appear only after an embryo grows for about five days and, more important, forms a blastocyst, a sphere of cells with a ball of stem cells inside it. The Advanced Cell Technology embryos that were created by cloningwere not even close to that developmental stage. Copyright New York Times Company Nov 27, 2001Full Text:When Advanced Cell Technology, a small biotechnology company in Worcester, Mass., announced on Sunday that it had taken the first steps in producing human embryos through cloning, it could not report lasting success; allthe embryos it created had died. It could not even report that it had used groundbreaking techniques; itsmethods had already been used in animals. Some scientists even suggested that what the company was doing was notcloning at all. But if there is a future in human cloning, either for reproductive purposes or to create cell lines for use in treating diseases, people may one day say it started in Worcester. Despite the storm of protest that the companys announcement has provoked, that would be just fine with Advanced Cell Technology. Its president, Dr. Michael D. West, says the company feels pressure to keep the world informedabout what it is doing in so controversial a field. But he concedes that the desire to be the first to claim to have created a human embryo by cloning was a factor in the companys decision to publish its results so far. Whatever the scientific significance of Dr. Wests announcement, its political significance was profound. President Bush denounced the work as immoral, and there were loud calls for Congress to outlaw it. Page A12.Shadowing the raging dispute on whether such work should be outlawed is a major scientific question: Is the human-cloning attempt a milestone or a forgettable blunder? The answer, cloning experts say, is that it is impossibleto know. ork with animals has shown that cloning is something of an art. There are no rules or formulas. Success, when it comes, can be unpredictable and nearly inexplicable. It could be that human cloning is extraordinarily difficult and that it will take years and thousands of attempts to make it work. Or it could be that a simple change in the laboratory procedure will turn failure into success. That has been the experience of scientists who work at cloning animals. For Advanced Cell Technology, these uncertainties loom large. The company is betting that it can perfect human cloning, creating embryos not for reproductive purposes but as a source of stem cells. Human embryonic stem cells could, in theory, grow into any of the bodys tissues and organs, and the company wants to provide them as replacement cells to patientssuffering from any of a wide variety of disease s. The small company has a track record of achievement in the world of cloning animals; some of the leading cloning researchers are on its payroll. But it also has a track record of astute dealings with the news media. In interviews, Dr. West acknowledged that scientists for the company had published their results in a little-known online publication E-biomed: The Journal of Regenerative Medicine because E-biomed had agreed to arrange for distribution to coincide with articles in Scientific Americanand U.S. News and World Report. Like many other small biotechnology concerns, privately held Advanced CellTechnology attracts investors with promise, not profits. And though Dr. West said the company had just completed a round of fund-raising, he noted that it would have continuing needs for money to finance its work. Were going to require hundreds of millions in investments, he said, before we become profitable. In the work reported on Sunday, the companys scientists, led by Dr. Jose Cibel li, used a standard technique that involves taking the genetic material out of an unfertilized egg and inserting in its place the DNA of an adult cell. In theory, the egg then uses the genes from the adult cell to direct its development, turning into an embryo that is an exact genetic copy ofthe donor of the adult cell. The company tried to clone with two types of adult cells: skin cells and cumulus cells, which are cells that cling to human eggs. The researchers added skin cells to 11 eggs; none divided even once. They added cumulus cells to eight eggs; three divided once or twice, the others not at all. Stem cells appear only after an embryo grows for about five days and, more important, forms a blastocyst, a sphere of cells with a ball of stem cells inside it. The Advanced Cell Technology embryos that were created by cloning were not even close to that developmental stage. Dr. Ronald M. Green, a Dartmouth professor who heads the companys ethics board, says he prefers not even referring to the cells as embryos. He would like to call them cleaving eggs, he said. In fact, scientists say, eggs can divide a few times without making any use of their genes, so the fact that a few eggs divided a few times does not at all mean that the goal of the experiment to add a new set of functioning genes to an egg was even close. But cloning failures can suddenly turn to successes, as those who have cloned other species attest. That was the experience of Dr. Randall Prather, a cloning expert at the University of Missouri, in years of efforts to clone pigs. Over and over again, Dr. Prather would start the cloning process, and then the cells, like those in the Advanced Cell Technology study, would simply die. Now he and others can clone pigs, but he does not know which changes in his laboratory procedures made the difference. All he can say, Dr. Prather remarked, is, Yeah, now it works.Cloning also depends on scientists having a delicate touch, experts said. One scientist now with Advanced Cell Technology, Dr. Tony Perry, who worked on mouse cloning experiments at the University of Hawaii, said it tookendless hours of practice to do the careful manipulations of microscopic cells involved in cloning. Some people develop a feel for the work, while others, no matter how hard they try, are never very good. It requires a kind of eye-hand coordination and constant practice, Dr. Perry said, recalling months of practice, seven days a week, 10 hours a day. If you lapse in your practice for two weeks, he said, you dont return to point zero, but youre a little bit rusty. There are also puzzling and unpredictable differences between species. Dr. Ryuzo Yanagimachi, who cloned the mice with Dr. Teruhik o Wakayama, also now with Advanced Cell Technology, said about 2 to 3 percent of effortsto clone cattle resulted in the birth of a live animal. Most of the rest die very early: only about 20 percent of the embryo clones make it to the blastocyst stage. With mice, Dr. Yanagimachi said, about 50 to 60 percent of the embryo clones make it to the blastocyst stage. But even more die afterward. In the end, he said, the same percentage of mouse cloning attempts succeed as cattlecloning attempWords/ Pages : 11,058 / 24