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CLONING HUMANS - A REALITY

MELNO PARK, California, June 14 (LSN) US scientists have admitted to cloning humans and to creating animal-human hybrid embryos. While a federal ban only bars federal funding of such experimentation, privately funded ventures have been allowed and are doing the unthinkable.

Geron Corp. of Menlo Park, Calif. and Advanced Cell Therapeutics (ACT) of Worcester, Mass., admitted that they are working in the area of human cloning. The Washington Post reported today that the companies are creating cloned human embryos in order to kill them and use their "stem cells" to grow human body parts. While the companies remain secretive about how far their research has gone, or where exactly it is taking place, Jose Cibelli, the ACT's director of cell biology, indicated that the cloned human embryos live. "We don't let [the embryos] go beyond, I'd say, 10 or 12 days before we destroy them," Cibelli said.

Human cells are removed from adults (sometimes by scrapings taken from the inner cheek) and then placed into a human or cow egg, the nucleus of which has been removed. Theoretically, if implanted into a womb, the embryos would be born as genetic replicas of the adult whose cell was used. While the Geron Corp. uses human eggs, ACT uses cow eggs for the procedure, making an embryo that could be called a human-animal hybrid.

While the ethical implications are mind-boggling, such wild considerations have been commonplace since the advent of in-vitro fertilization. Winnifred Prestwich, a researcher with Campaign Life Coalition, told LifeSite that the first baby born of IVF Louise Brown was transported inside a rabbit before she was implanted into the womb of her mother.

For the story from the Washington Post see:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-06/14/053r-061499-idx.html

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