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The scientists behind the human embryo cloning controversy announced Sunday that they had made monkey eggs grow into embryos
without the benefit of sperm, through a process called parthenogenesis. They said their experiments showed the potential for using the therapy to provide tailored medical treatments for women, or possibly to use eggs donated by women to treat close relatives. They also opened new avenues of understanding basic biology and when life begins.

Michael West, chief executive officer of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), said the goal of his company is to use these experiments to create new ways of rejuvenating human tissues and treating disease. "This whole field is so new. That is why we need all opportunities to be open," he told a conference on regenerative medicine. West, along with other scientists at the conference called on the U.S. government to keep their research legal and to provide funding for it.

Last Sunday West said scientists at his Massachusetts-based company had cloned three human embryos using nuclear transfer - they took a human egg, removed the nucleus and replaced it with the nucleus from another adult's cell. West also said they had created a human embryo through parthenogenesis.

West has repeatedly stressed that they do not intend to breed babies but to use the embryos as a source of stem cells, which could be used to grow tissue and even organ transplants for patients using their own cells. None of the tiny balls of cells -- the largest grew only to six cells -- lived very long. Other scientists in the field criticized the work, saying the ACT team had done nothing special. They said other experimenters successfully got eggs to generate to six-cell size without using nuclear transfer or the other methods employed by the ACT team. They said in order to be truly successful, the tiny embryos would have to divide to the blastocyst stage, a hollow ball of about 100 eggs.

The scientists say that it is not until blastocyst stage that stem cells can be removed from the embryos. West's presentation at Sunday's conference was sponsored by the Mary Ann Liebert publishing company that published the human cloning study. His presentation partially answered the criticisms. The team, led by ACT vice-president Jose Cibelli, got eggs taken from macaque monkeys to divide to blastocyst size. "We got 14 percent of them forming blastocysts and rather nice ones," West told the conference.

They pulled cells out of one of the blastocysts that looked like embryonic stem cells. Despite the attention given to stem cell research, the elusive cells, which act like a master cell for the body, are extremely difficult to isolate and identify. "These cells grow rather well," West said. He said cells taken from the blastocyst were coaxed into becoming neurons. The neurons secreted dopamine and serotonin, two important hormones produced in the brain.

One way to test stem cells is to inject them into mice with poor immune systems. The cells will often grow into tumors known as teratomas. Cells taken from these teratomas grew into epithelial cells -- the cells that, for instance, line the intestine. Others became eye cells, hair follicle cells or skin cells, West said.

They hope that someday a person's own stem cells could be used to grow new brain cells to repair the damage done by Parkinson's, or to repair a heart ravaged by heart attack, or to cure diabetes. However, some critics say experiments involving the destruction of human embryos constitute murder and should be outlawed.

Source: Reuters
Cosmiverse Staff Writer