Word: yangness
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...postings in New Delhi and Washington, at the U.N. and in Vienna before becoming South Korea's Foreign Minister in 2004. The years abroad gave him global contacts and helped protect his reputation from the taint of South Korea's toxic political environment. "He doesn't make enemies," says Yang Sun Mook, a senior official of the country's opposition Democratic Party. "He makes friends." But Ban can also be tough. In the face of opposition from his own diplomats, Ban reformed Seoul's foreign ministry, replacing a promotion system based on seniority with a meritocratic...
...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...
...useful in cloning, although they're still not sure why. Nearly 40% of these more mature cells developed to the blastocyst stage, at 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...
...Even Yang admits, however, that his study isn't the last word on cloning. He and his colleagues are already at work expanding this first trial, and investigating other ways to boost cloning's efficiency...