Human Cloning Efforts Continue

I mentioned below that Harvard researchers are still trying to succeed where Korean researchers pretended they had in 2004 – in cloning a human embryo. While I was gallivanting in rural Pennsylvania over the last few days I missed announcements from Advanced Cell Technology and the University of California at San Francisco that both institutions are separately trying to do the same. Seems a new race is on for the first cloned human embryo.

Here are the reports from the San Francisco Chronicle and the Wall Street Journal . And here's the press release from ACT.

Carl Hall reports in the Chron:

At least half a dozen other groups in the United States and abroad also are getting involved in such work, signaling a renewed global push to achieve what experimenters in South Korea falsely claimed to have done last year.

The ultimate goal ranks among the most important in experimental biology: to create "patient-specific" stem cell lines to study how diseases develop and to make transplant cells matched to a patient's own genes, thus avoiding the usual risks of rejection.

That last point is arguable, since other researchers are investigating alternatives to getting around the immune rejection problem. Tom Okarma of Geron has said that cloning is unnecessary for cell therapy.

Via the California Stem Cell Report.