CHANGSHA, China, March 6, 2002 (LSN.ca) – Chinese scientists are claiming to have successfully cloned human embryos for research purposes since 1999. Professor Lu Guangxiu of the Xiangya Medical College, acknowledged as one of China’s foremost experts in the field, says she and her team of researchers were successful at cloning human embryos two years prior to the U.S. company, Advanced Cell Technology, which claimed to be the first to clone human embryos last year.

The Wall Street Journal reports that while her research has not been published in a major peer-reviewed journal, scientists in China and the US who are familiar with her work say her claims are credible. Running a fertility clinic has given Lu access to a ready supply of human ova. Lu says that about 5% of the human embryos cloned in her multi-million dollar lab now develop to the blastocyst stage. She notes that she has experimented with attempting to produce human clones from aborted baby skin cells under the assumption that since the cells aren’t yet fully developed, it might be easier for the egg to reprogram their DNA.

Lu claims to be against allowing human clones to be born but said that the science will lead there. “It is an irresistible trend,” she said. The Journal also reports that Sheng Huizhen, a biologist at Shanghai No. 2 Medical University, claims to have succeeded in deriving stem cells from embryos created by fusing human tissue with the egg cells of rabbits. Dr. Sheng, a former employee of the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Maryland, presented her work recently to scientists at the University of Texas’s Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

Paul Berg, a Nobel laureate in chemistry at Stanford University told the Journal that the Chinese revelations put American ethics in the area to the test. “We will either condemn them [the Chinese] as godless members of an evil empire, or we will say ‘Hey, wait a second, we can’t be left out of this race,” he said.