http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=doctor-attempts-to-clone-people-2009-04-22
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Doctor Attempts To Clone People
Dr. Panayiotis Zavos, a controversial fertility doctor, claims that with proper training and research, humans should be able to be cloned within the next year or two. Recently, Zavos cloned fourteen human embryos and placed eleven of them in women uteruses; none actually were born successfully, but Zavos is confident that clones will certainly be prevalent in the near future. Several others, including renowned molecular geneticist Oleg Verlinsky, believes that Zavos is very capable of creating clones, much in the same way that animals have been cloned using adult cells. The method that Zavos uses in the cloning process is called "somatic cell nuclear transfer," in which the nucleus of a human cell is replaced by the nucleus of an adult somatic cell, instead of the gamete. Despite all of this, many are skeptical of Zavos' methods; scientists claim that while cloning embryos may certainly be feasible, cloning humans is an entirely different and more complex matter. Denny Sakkas, who directs the Assisted Reproduction Laboratories at Yale University School of Medicine, says that the adult somatic nucleus must revert to its totipotent state, and there are several gene complications which can arise in the process which may not lead to successful cloning. Also, The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) claimed that cloning was an extremely dangerous process, and recent studies involving the cloning of animals revealed that they aged prematurely and developed inferior brains. Though Zavos has many cloning ambitions, many are very skeptical that such a dangerous process will even work.
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2 comments:
Where exactly is this guy doing his research? Anyway, it all seems very possible since human reproduction is not all that different from animal reproduction. The problem arises in the shortened telomeres in the donor cell nucleus which leads to the premature aging in clones. While it does raise certain ethical and moral questions from a scientific perspective it would be an excellent advance allowing for development in cloning related fields.
This is not only ridiculously unethical, but also seemingly dangerous for the women involved. Who knows how their bodies could react to the foreign body, of a cloned cell. Cloning people will have horrible repercussions, i.e eugenics, and all those modern distopian problems.
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