Cloning Part 1 (My concern is wisdom and stupidity inside of humans.)

Since 1996 when Dolly was born, a variety of other animals have been duplicated. In 2001 a pet cat was created in the US. It was the first time that cloned pet cats have been created. After that, that company has produced those pets on a commercial basis. They offer to clone cats to pet owners. Now 6 pet owners have applied for cloning their pets. It costs US$50,000. What's more, a cloned racehorse was published in Italy in 2003. The same researchers announced the second cloned racehorse's success in February, 2005. The second one is the first clone to be produced from a sterile animal. That“father”was won the world race championship twice. In two years, the cloned foal can be used as a stallion.



The international society absolutely prohibits producing cloned babies. On the other hand, researchers have been going on creating cloned human embryos to treat disease. It means that patients could be treated their disease by using the patients own somatic cells. There are two key-words. One is “a cloned embryo”. It is produced by unfertilized eggs whose nuclei are removed and other somatic cells are put into them instead of the nuclei. The other key-word is “an embryonic stem cell”. It is generally produced by cultivating fertilized eggs under specific conditions. Embryo-stem cells have potential to become any kind of tissue or organs in the body. An American team first succeeded to create human embryo-stem cells by using human fertilized eggs.



And then the Seoul National University team informed that they produced human embryo-stem cells from cloned embryos in February 2004. It would have been the first success in the world if what they announced had been true. They said that the same woman donated both her eggs and her somatic cells and researchers gained just one embryo-stem cell out of 242 cloned embryos. And then on May 20th in 2005 the same team announced the second success. That time 18 women donated 185 eggs. The researchers removed their nuclei from them, and put somatic cells, which were from real patients, into those unfertilized eggs. As a result, they gained 11 embryo-stem cells. Now the Seoul National University admitted that there were no human ES-cells from cloned embryos. They forged the monograph.



If the Seoul team had succeeded in making human ES-cells, it would have made a very significant and important step forward the use of cells from cloned human embryos for research and therapy. The promise of new treatments based on stem cell technology would have been moving nearer to becoming a realistic possibility. Degenerative brain diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, insulin-dependent diabetes and spinal cord injuries are just some examples. There has been still an argument whether we can make cloned embryos of humans or apes. Due to this time false report, that argument was rekindled. It would be a heavy blow to countries that have put a great deal of State budgets into such kind of projects.