The First Clone
Scientists have finally cloned a human embryo. The breakthrough promises cures for terrible diseases. Here's the inside story:
The ramifications
They were only clusters of four and six cells, but in them ACT's scientists saw a revolution in medicine that will render many of today's drugs and treatments obsolete. Essentially, cells yielded from human research cloning are the same stem cells that President Bush decided are promising enough to fund, only better. Unlike existing stem cell lines, stem cells created through cloning would provide a patient with a fresh supply of cells with his or her own genetic code. Gone would be transplant failures and the need for immune-suppressing drugs. In the same way that antibiotics and vaccines rid the world of infectious plagues a half century ago, says Lanza, these cells could for the first time eradicate the chronic, degenerative diseases of our day, such as cancer, Alzheimer's, and heart disease. "I watched diabetes destroy my mother, who got it at age 50, and then I came down with it 10 years sooner," says Pablo Naumann, who has also donated body cells for ACT's experiments. "I really want to keep all my limbs intact and be a good father for my daughter as she grows up."
Because body cells are rejuvenated by an egg's proteins, therapeutic cloning would also tackle aging itself, replenishing the body with younger, more vigorous cells than even the most healthy cells already in place. And because DNA removed from a body cell can be tinkered with before it is placed into an egg, Lanza hopes someday to add factors--genes for immune cells, for example, that would make a patient resistant to AIDS.
To make these possibilities a reality in humans sooner, Lanza has forged partnerships with a number of prestigious labs to use therapeutic cloning to cure diseases in animals (box, Page 62). "We've already been able to turn cloned animal stem cells into large disks of bone, into beating heart cells, and whole dishes full of replacement neurons that could treat Parkinson's disease," says Lanza. "We've also created new cartilage, skin, kidney, and heart tissue that was transplanted back into adult steers without rejection. This isn't some futuristic dream. We are doing this right now."
The dream has its detractors, and not just among politicians. Some biologists are set on avoiding moral issues by trying to coax adult stem cells back to an embryonic state. Even James Thomson--one of the stem cell pioneers funded by West--believes that he may be able to tinker with the genetics of generic stem cells to make them less likely to be rejected, thus making DNA-specific matches unnecessary.
But in the absence of a proven better alternative, to halt the work now, says West, would be like taking penicillin away from doctors in the last century. Indeed, many medical developments have been at least temporarily halted because of ethical qualms. Religious leaders found vaccines objectionable because they interfered with God's plan for who should get sick, and in vitro fertilization was condemned in the 1970s by many of the same conservative ethicists who today oppose therapeutic cloning. Organ transplants were once seen as objectionable. And recombinant DNA technology--the ability to create synthetic genes--was banned from top universities like Harvard and MIT for years, for fear that horrible and dangerous creatures would be produced. But much of the opposition melted when the technology was used to create a synthetic form of insulin to treat diabetics, and today recombinant DNA is used in virtually every research lab in the world.
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