The First Clone
Scientists have finally cloned a human embryo. The breakthrough promises cures for terrible diseases. Here's the inside story:
All three are equally insistent that cloning for reproductive purposes is completely unethical, because the risks to both child and mother are too great. In fact, West considers the Raelian cult and other groups that claim to be working on cloning an actual human being to be his company's worst enemies: Any success could scare the public enough to sink ACT's efforts at providing new medical cures.
The effort
Because of the hostile climate, it took nearly two years for Cibelli to even begin the experiments. During that time, the partners searched for members to serve on an ethics board and debated how to best go about getting donors for both body cells and human eggs. Should they ask Christopher Reeve to donate his cells? Should Cibelli's willing wife donate her eggs? The questions and concerns seemed endless. One major turning point came in late September of 1999, when Cibelli met with Harvard professor Ann Kiessling, who agreed within five minutes to help set up a program to collect eggs from women. Another breakthrough came in mid-2000, when Dartmouth's Green agreed to head ACT's ethics advisory board. Under their leadership, very strict guidelines were set up for the collection of eggs and body cells, which finally began early this year.
The pace was maddeningly slow. While scientists working to clone cow eggs might have 1,400 to work with at a given time, and those working with mice could easily have 2,000 eggs on hand, the number of human eggs available to the lab was minuscule. The researchers hoped to collect about two dozen eggs a month from donors, but even that was an ambitious goal, and when the eggs did arrive, there were often only five or 10 to work with.
With precious human eggs too few and far between, Cibelli spent his time between deliveries practicing the transfer of nuclear DNA from a half-dozen or so body cell donors into cow eggs just to perfect his technique. Often he would return to the lab late at night, after playing with his two daughters and putting them to bed, to work uninterrupted by daytime office demands.
That's where he was at midnight on August 9, after President Bush announced that he would allow limited federal support for stem cell research but opposed human cloning even for research purposes. Driving his daughters home from a trip to choose a new puppy, he hadn't quite heard over the burble of his girls' banter Bush's description of research cloning as "growing human beings for spare body parts." But transfixed at the microscope, Cibelli knew he was racing the clock to show therapeutic cloning's benefits before the work was declared criminal. "It's hard to describe why this work is so important, why I would go anywhere in the world to do it," he mused. "It's just that there is nothing else in all of medical research that is anywhere near this promising."
And that's where he was at 3:15 a.m. on October 10, after removing the DNA from several human eggs, injecting them with DNA from body cells, and then tricking the eggs into thinking they had been fertilized so that they would begin the work of multiplying (graphic, Page 57). But this time, Cibelli left the lab in a depressed mood. The eggs looked a little sickly, and he was convinced he had damaged them beyond repair. But when he called two days later from Michigan, his lab assistant gave him the news he had been wanting to hear for almost five years: The eggs were cleaving into the world's very first known human cloned embryos.
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