Word: hwang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...example, whereas Hwang's assistants gently squeeze the nuclei from eggs donated by female volunteers, researchers at other labs use a microaspirator to suck out the contents, which Hwang believes may damage the eggs unnecessarily. "Professor Hwang jokes that we're good at manipulating the egg this way because we can use chopsticks," says Okjae Koo, one of the graduate students...
...fused cell is stimulated electrically and chemically to get it to start dividing. At that point, other researchers have used animal-based growth factors and feeder cells to sustain the growing egg, but that creates problems if the cells are going to be used to treat humans. So Hwang has concocted a growth medium made of human-based nutrients, starting with human skin cells from one of the donor subjects...
...start growing out onto the underlying feeder cells, the researchers don't try to hurry the process. Most scientists working with embryos left over from in-vitro-fertilization treatments will use chemicals at this stage to separate the cells. "I think the less we manipulate the cells the better," Hwang says...
Such respect for the natural order of things might seem unusual in a scientist whose work seems anything but natural. But for Hwang, generating stem cells is more than just a scientific process. It's no accident that there are more people than machines in Hwang's lab. It's part of an effort on his part to keep the entire procedure as human as possible. He even makes sure that at least one of his researchers keeps the cells company all day and most of the night, as a way of nurturing respect for them. "In this kind...
...Hwang also takes care to avoid off-putting words such as cloning or therapeutic cloning, preferring instead to call his process nuclear transfer. He doesn't want anyone to confuse his work with reproductive cloning, which he deems "unsafe and unethical." He thinks cloning fully grown humans may be biologically impossible, given the many miscarriages and genetic anomalies that have bedeviled attempts to clone animals, and he doesn't like giving people the impression that therapies or treatment will be available anytime soon...