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HUMAN CLONING MAY NEVER BE POSSIBLE GIVEN GROSS CLONING ABNORMALITIES

WASHINGTON, DC, December 13, 2001 (LSN.ca) - Dr. Tanja Dominko made a presentation last week on her research attempts to clone monkeys. After three years and nearly 300 attempts she gave up calling the cells, which were supposed to be cloned embryos, a "gallery of horrors."

Following the same process of nuclear transfer used to create the cloned sheep "Dolly", Domniko found that the newly manufactured 'embryos' would not divide further than elemental stages. Moreover she found that the embryos were massively deformed while appearing superficially healthy. The New Scientist reports that the 'embryos' did not form distinct nuclei containing all the chromosomes, but that the chromosomes were scattered unevenly throughout the cells. Dominko suggested that the trauma of removing the nucleus from the egg might be what triggers the defects since eggs whose nuclei are removed and then put back inside show the same abnormalities.

Dr. Ian Wilmut, the scientist who created Dolly concurred with Dominko's observations saying that while scientists have cloned sheep, cattle, mice, goats and pigs, no one has been able to clone rabbits, rats, cats, dogs or monkeys. "Even the same teams that succeeded with other species failed with these," Dr. Wilmut told the New York Times.

In general, he said, just 1 to 4 percent of cloning efforts in the species where it has worked results in the birth of a live animal. That, he said, indicates that cloning appears to create serious abnormalities in almost all embryos.

See the reports in the New Scientist and New York Times:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991679
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/11/science/11CLON.html

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