Latest nuclear transfer Stories
The British scientist who broke ground with the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996 has embraced a new technology for a non-embryo stem cell production. Professor Ian Wilmut cloned a ewe he named Dolly using a nuclear transfer method whereby stem cells are produced by inserting adult DNA into enucleated embryos and cloning the embryo. Wilmut decided not to pursue a license to clone human embryos following new research by a Japanese team into coaxing stem cells from the skin cells of mice,...
By James GrubelCANBERRA -- Australian politicians will push to overturn a ban on cloning stem cells for medical research after Australia's conservative Prime Minister John Howard said he would allow a conscience vote on the issue.The issue, to be debated in September, will stir deep moral passions among Australia's politicians and likely divide the ruling Liberal-National Party government soon after an internal revolt forced Howard on Monday to scrap tough new refugee laws."Putting a...
LONDON -- His creator has been discredited and controversy has long surrounded him but scientists confirmed on Wednesday that an Afghan hound named Snuppy is the world's first cloned dog.A panel of experts at Seoul National University and researchers in the United States carried out similar DNA experiments using blood samples from Snuppy, the cell donor dog and the surrogate mother.They said the results showed he was cloned by researchers led by disgraced South Korean scientist Hwang...
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science CorrespondentST. LOUIS -- Stem cell researchers are undeterred by the scandal surrounding falsified South Korean research and said on Friday it is only a matter of time before someone clones a human embryo as a source of the valuable cells.They said the field was moving forward despite opposition from the United States and some other governments, and described progress in understanding how the cells might be used some day to transform...
Results reassure those who worried lines created without fertilized embryo might go awryStem cells taken from cloned embryos are likely to be safe when used for therapeutic purposes, a new study finds."This is actually really good news," said Tobias Brambrink, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in the (Rudy) Jaenisch lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.Although the work, which appears online this week in the Proceedings of...
South Korean fraud is disappointing but the dream remains alive, they contendWhat had once seemed a giant leap for science has turned out to be not even the smallest of steps -- for now.Seoul National University's announcement Tuesday that all of Dr. Hwang Woo-suk's apparently groundbreaking research in human stem cells was faked closes a bitter chapter in the quest to find more and better remedies for human illnesses.Hwang's only legitimate claim is having cloned the world's first dog,...
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science CorrespondentWASHINGTON -- Meticulous tests like those done to confirm that disgraced Korean scientists legitimately cloned a dog while faking human data may have to be used to validate scientific claims in the future, U.S. scientists said on Tuesday.A panel at Seoul National University concluded that two reports claiming that human embryos had been cloned to provide stem cells had been completely fabricated, but also found that the same team's claims to have...
SEOUL -- A pioneering South Korean stem-cell scientist said on Monday that his work met strict government guidelines on ethics, including on human egg donations, after a top U.S. scientist suspended collaboration.Professor Woo-Suk Hwang of Seoul National University did not comment directly on the move by Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh to halt his work with Hwang, citing possible irregularities recruiting egg donors."We are the only research team (in South Korea) with the...
Researchers have developed a new technique for creating human embryonic stem cells by fusing adult somatic cells with embryonic stem cells. The fusion causes the adult cells to undergo genetic reprogramming, which results in cells that have the developmental characteristics of human embryonic stem cells. This approach could become an alternative to somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), a method that is currently used to produce human stem cells. SCNT involves transferring the nuclei of adult...
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science CorrespondentWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have created a new human embryonic stem cell from an ordinary skin cell, U.S. researchers said on Monday.They hope their method, which fuses an embryonic stem cell to an ordinary skin cell and bone cells, could someday provide tailor-made medical treatments without having to start from scratch using cloning technology.That would also mean generating the valuable cells without using a human egg, and without...
