By Dave Andrusko
"Cloning is at present as much an art as a science. The success rate is very low. What really gave the Korean team an edge was that they were able to obtain 242 human eggs from 16 women volunteers who took hormone treatment to stimulate egg production. An ethics committee in the West might have questioned this, as the women themselves got no benefit. An American or European team would be lucky to get 20 eggs, as they are in short supply for IVF treatments, never mind 'blue skies' research."
Nigel Hawkes, London Times
"The Korean scientists, if their experiment is confirmed in other laboratories, will have proved, in principle, the viability of the first step in therapeutic cloning, that of converting an ordinary body cell back into the embryonic state. But one element in their success is simply that they were able to amass enough human eggs to get the standard techniques to work, and had no legal restrictions standing in their way."
Nicholas Wade, New York Times
A team of South Korean researchers reported in the February 13 issue of the journal Science that it had created a cloned human embryo from which it derived stem cells. Cardinal William Keeler, chairman of the Committee for Pro-Life Activities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said this use of cloning to create and destroy human embryos "is a sign of moral regress."
The loss in human life was much more extensive than most press reports suggest. Using the 242 human eggs, the team of veterinary cloning expert Hwang Woo Suk and gynecologist Moon Shin Youg made 213 embryos at the two-celled stage. Forty survived to the "compacted morula" stage (3-4 days), then 30 to the blastocyst stage (5-7 days). From this the researchers were able to get inner cell masses from 20, but established a stable stem cell line from only one.
Hwang and Moon, both researchers at Seoul National University, argued that they were not intending to produce a baby (so-called "reproductive cloning") but (eventually) tailor-made replacement cells to assume the duties of cells damaged by disease (typically called "therapeutic" or "research" cloning). The theory is that some stem cells taken from human embryos can be coaxed into becoming almost any type of cell in the body.
As Nigel Hawkes noted in the quote reproduced above, the research protocol used would hardly be acceptable by American standards. Sixteen women were pumped full of powerful hormones to stimulate the production of eggs (ova) which were then harvested.
The nuclei of the eggs were removed and replaced with the nuclei from other cells. These nuclei came either from the same women who donated the eggs (from cumulus cells, the cells that surround a woman's eggs), adult cells from women other than the donor, or (in attempts to clone male embryos) cells taken from the ear lobes of adult men.
According to the Chicago Tribune, "Chemicals in the egg's interior, or cytoplasm, then caused it to reprogram the replacement nucleus, deactivating the adult genes and switching on embryo genes," a kind of Rip Van Winkle in reverse. "Researchers were able to collect embryonic stem cells from the resulting cell mass inside 20 cloned blastocysts, which are very early embryos."
For all the eggs harvested, nuclei sucked out, and cloned blastocysts manufactured, the South Korean researchers were only able to produce a single culture of embryonic cells. The only technique that worked was when the nuclei came from the cumulus cells of the same women who donated the eggs.
As the input-to-success ratio suggests, "Cloning is an arduous process, and using it to create tailor-made replacement cells may prove impractical," as Gina Kolata, writing in the New York Times, explained. "Cloning uses human eggs, and that means finding young women who agree to be donors. Dr. John Gearhart, a stem cell expert at Johns Hopkins University, estimated that even if there were eggs and even if scientists knew how to efficiently get cloned stem cells that match a patient and to turn them into replacement cells, it would take months, perhaps a year, to make cells for an individual patient."
A constant source of confusion is when researchers maintain that the work the South Koreans were involved in is so-called "therapeutic" (or "research") cloning, not "reproductive" cloning. Hawkes had this revealing answer in an online "Q&A."
The question was posed, "How is this different from cloning human babies?" The answer? "Not very different, except that the development of the embryo is halted at an early stage, after just a week, and long before it would be recognisable as a baby," Hawkes writes. "Technically the same process could be used to create a baby, if the developing foetus had been placed in a woman's womb rather then being used as a source of stem cells."
The fact that there are very viable alternatives was only occasionally mentioned in press accounts.
"Some scientists say it would be more practical to use stem cells from adults," writes Andrew Pollack for the New York Times News Service. "While some experts say these cells cannot be grown outside the body as easily as embryonic stem cells and may not be as versatile [a highly debatable point], they are more predictable in what kind of cells they turn into."
Brian Alexander is author of Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion, and supportive of cloning, including the use of cloning to produce a live birth.
He conceded this in an interview with Wired.com:
"It's possible that there may be a better way to do this. It might be done by taking cells already in our body and switching their function," he said. Ironically, Alexander offered as an example actor Christopher Reeve, a vociferous proponent of the use of embryonic stem cells and cloning, who was paralyzed when he was thrown from a horse.
"He [Reeve] is somehow managing to gain some function back that people didn't think he was going to get, thanks to this intense program he's in," Alexander told Wired.com. "They think what's happening is some cells are being recruited and switching their jobs. It's possible his body is regenerating, in a small way...."
There are other possible options, including freezing the stem cell-rich blood from the umbilical cord of newborn babies.
"Cloning human beings is wrong. It is unethical to tinker with human life," said Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa). A ban must be passed, he said, "before this unethical science comes to our shores," the Associated Press reported.
President Bush has been steadfast in calling for "a comprehensive and effective ban." As he said January 22, on the 31st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, " Human life is a creation, not a commodity, and should not be used as research material for reckless experiments."