Word: embryos
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...Researchers at University of Connecticut may have done just that. A report released in Nature Genetics Sunday by Xiangzhong Yang and Tao Cheng showed that by using a specific type of fully mature adult cell, they could improve the chances that they would produce a cloned embryo. Yang's team relied on the same technique that was used to create both Dolly and Snuppy, but instead of starting with cells that are still capable of dividing - like the mammary cell that created Dolly and the skin cell that became Snuppy - they used blood cells near the end of their life...
...fact, Yang's findings fly in the face of conventional wisdom in the cloning field, which held that cloning, which involves turning back the clock on adult cells, worked better with younger, more "embryo"-like cells. The less that the cloning process has to undo, the theory goes, the more successful the technique will be. In fact, there was good evidence to support this theory: In previous studies embryonic stem cells, which can generate all of the body's cell types, produced clones ten times more efficiently than adult stem cells, which can develop into only a restricted number...
...which point stem cells can be extracted, while only 4% of the more actively dividing cells did so. "That is good news for therapeutic cloning," notes Yang. From his research, Yang believes that most of the problems that occur in cloning occur after the blastocyst stage, when the embryo begins to divide to re-create all the tissue types in a developing fetus. "Based on our studies, we believe that development of a cloned embryo to the blastocyst stage is fairly normal," he says. "So cloning for [treatment] purposes is no problem...
...concluded that the U.S. was "falling behind in the international race to make fundamental discoveries" in the field. Asian efforts are well funded, but haven't escaped difficulties either. South Korean veterinary scientist Woo Suk Hwang, who cloned the first dog and claimed to have cloned the first human embryo, was discredited late last year after he confessed to falsifying many of his results. Liberal laws and renewed funding, meanwhile, are pushing Europe toward the front of the field. The UK Stem Cell Foundation, a private charity, is raising $185 million for research in Britain, and the British government will...
...percent of abortion-seekers, who say that they do intend to have children in the future. In fact, the human body will often make the same choice on its own, albeit for purely physical reasons—if a woman is malnourished, the uterine lining will often reabsorb the embryo instead of letting it develop, sensing that the body does not possess the physical resources to allow it to develop to term...