Word: hwang
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Indeed, the most immediate benefit of Hwang's work, assuming it can be replicated, will be to better understand how diseases develop. "Rather than having to study the patient or freshly dissected tissues from that patient, we can have a cell line of stem cells that can grow virtually forever," says Hans Keirstead, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Irvine...
Meanwhile, the question many researchers are asking is: What will the South Koreans do next? Hwang met last week with Scotland's Ian Wilmut, Dolly's cloner, who wants to work with the South Koreans on Lou Gehrig's disease. Similar collaborations are under way at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Md. By the end of last week, however, Hwang was back at his lab in Seoul, putting even more distance between himself and the rest of the scientific world...