Word: hwang
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This is the sixth-floor lab in Building No. 85 at Seoul National University, the center of operations for Woo Suk Hwang, the South Korean scientist who made headlines last week when he announced that his team, using Dolly-the-sheep techniques, had created 11 human stem-cell lines perfectly matched to the DNA of human patients--a giant leap beyond anything any other lab has achieved. The eggs hollowed out in Building No. 85 were fused with skin cells taken from nearly a dozen patients--ages 2 to 56, suffering from a variety of injuries and disorders--and grown...
...Hwang's methods are controversial, however--particularly in the U.S.--and the White House immediately criticized the experiment. The process is called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), but most people know it colloquially as therapeutic cloning. "I am very concerned about cloning," President Bush said in response to the news. "I worry about a world in which cloning becomes accepted." If Congress manages to pass a bill it is considering that would lift some of the restrictions on stem-cell research in the U.S., the President promised to veto...
...crux of that breakthrough is this: each of the newly created stem-cell lines is genetically identical to one of Hwang's patients. That means any new tissue derived from that patient's cell line can be injected into that individual without triggering an immune reaction. If researchers can figure out how to fix the original defect, they may someday be able to generate replacement tissue that is custom designed to treat the patient's condition. Or at least that's the dream. No one knows yet whether those stem cells can be safely used in people...
Many scientists were astonished by how far the South Koreans had come. Only 15 months ago, Hwang's group created a stir as the first--and so far the only--lab to generate human stem cells via SCNT. Back then it had to use 242 eggs before it was able to create a single, viable set of stem cells from a healthy woman. This time it was able to create 11 stem-cell lines using an average 17 eggs each. "The efficiency is exceptionally high--much higher than I would have thought possible," says Doug Melton, a stem-cell researcher...
...South Korea but in China, Japan and Singapore as well--is rapidly outdistancing the work being done in the U.S., reflecting, in large part, real differences in government policy. South Korea, for example, recently banned the use of cloning techniques for the creation of babies but fully supports Hwang's work--to the tune of $2 million a year. By contrast, researchers in the U.S. who want to study human embryonic stem cells are restricted to a handful of federally approved stem-cell lines--most of which, they say, are of such poor quality they cannot be used. Or scientists...