Pretty awful. Go here.
Mature Human Embryos Created From Adult Skin Cells - washingtonpost.com
Creation of the embryos -- grown from cells taken from the company's chief executive and one of its investors -- also offered sobering evidence that few, if any, technical barriers may remain to the creation of cloned babies. That reality could prompt renewed controversy on Capitol Hill, where the debate over human cloning has died down of late.
Five of the new embryos grew in laboratory dishes to the stage that fertility doctors consider ready for transfer to a woman's womb: a degree of development that clones of adult humans have never achieved before.
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The closely held company hopes to make embryos that are clones, or genetic twins, of patients, then harvest stem cells from those embryos and grow them into replacement tissues. When transplanted into patients, the tissues would not be rejected because the immune system would see them as "self."
"All our efforts are being directed toward personalized medicine and diseases," said Wood, adding that the scientists did not try to extract stem cells from the first embryos they made because they were focused on proving they could make the clones.
Other stem cell scientists expressed optimism but said they want to see the work repeated and more details presented.
"I'd really like to believe it, but I'm not sold yet," said Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) in Worcester, Mass. He said the report did not show the results of molecular tests that scientists typically do to prove that the cloning process was complete. He and George Daley, a stem cell scientist at Children's Hospital Boston, said the embryos look only marginally healthy in photos.
The work is the latest evidence, however, that the field is recovering from the scientific and public relations debacle of 2005, when similar claims by South Korean scientists proved to have been fabricated.
Nevertheless, opponents of research on human embryos lashed out at the approach.
"This study seems to confirm that human cloning . . . is technically possible," said Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "It does not show that a viable or normal embryonic stem cell line can be derived this way, or that any such cell has 'therapeutic' value. It does not answer the ethical or social questions about the mass-production of developing human lives in order to destroy them. . . . It only tells us that these questions are more urgent than ever."
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In the new work, the team took skin cells -- some from Wood's arm and some from an anonymous Stemagen investor -- and fused them to eggs from women who were donating their eggs to help infertile women. About one-quarter of the resulting clones, or five in all, developed into five-day-old blastocysts.
Wood said the key was that his lab is directly adjacent to a fertility clinic with which the company has an arrangement, so his team obtained the eggs within an hour or so of when they were retrieved from the women's ovaries.
And although researchers are typically given the poorest quality "leftover" eggs from fertility patients, donors in this experiment -- and the women for whom those eggs were intended -- agreed to give away several of the best eggs because, in each case, they had far more than were needed.
"They are the heroes in this," Wood said. "Think about it. You're spending $25,000 [trying to get pregnant], and you're giving some of those eggs away."
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Asked what it was like to look at embryos that were replicas of himself, Wood said: "I have to admit, it's a very strange feeling. It is very difficult to look at an embryo and realize it is what you were a few decades ago. It is you, in a way."
Here's how it was done.
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