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Chinese Fusing Human Skin Cells With Rabbit Eggs to Produce Early Stage Embryos

SHANGHAI, China September 24, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The next step in cloning is being pursued in China. One of the standard secular objections to human cloning is that to make it commercially viable, it would require the extraction of an unlimited supply of human oocytes, (ova) from women. The extraction process is dangerous involving as it does the administration of artificial hormones to stimulate "hyper-ovulation".

Scientists have therefore been working to create clones from oocytes from non-human sources. In New Zealand, legislation has been proposed that would allow cloning and other forms of manipulation of embryos using artificially produced cells and molecules.

In Shanghai, Dr. Huizhen Sheng led a team of scientists at the Shanghai Second Medical University who have reported fusing human skin cells with rabbit eggs to produce early stage embryos, which in turn yielded stem cells.

Newsday.Com reports that the Chinese scientists fused human skin cells with rabbit eggs from which they had removed the nuclei, which contains DNA. The DNA of the skin cell no longer directs that cell's life, but begins driving embryonic development. "The resulting embryos were clones of the human donors, although they were never intended to develop into babies."

Experimental therapies on Parkinson's patients with stem cell derived from human embryos have proved to be disastrous for the patients, producing crippling, incurable side effects that were described by the researchers as "horrific". It is not known what effect stem cells from such artificial sources as Dr. Sheng is developing, would have on patients.

Dr. John Shea, medical advisor for Campaign Life Coalition Canada warned, "Along with the scientifically established genetic abnormalities in cloned embryos and the tissues derived from them, we will now add whole new vistas of possible animal abnormalities as well as the prospect of infecting patients with unknown viruses."

See Newsday report
http://www.newsday.com/news/health/wire/sns-ap-china-stem-cells,0,54416.story?co...

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