Headless frogs may help spur cloning
Associated Press
LONDON -- British scientists have created a frog embryo without a head, a technique that may lead to the production of headless human clones to grow organs and tissue for transplant, The Sunday Times reported. None of the embryos grown by scientists at Bath University were allowed to live longer than a week, the newspaper reported Saturday. But the scientists believe the technique could be adapted to grow human organs such as hearts, kidneys, and livers in an embryonic sac living in an artificial womb.
Some scientists have said human cloning is inevitable following the birth of the sheep Dolly, the world's first cloned mammal, at a laboratory in Scotland. Scientists at The Roslin Institute in Edinburgh created Dolly using cells from a dead sheep. The Sunday Times said the two techniques could be combined so that people needing transplants could have organs "grown to order" from their own cloned cells. The genetic composition of grown organs would exactly match those of the patient, eliminating the threat of rejection.
Growing partial embryos to cultivate customized organs could bypass legal restrictions and ethical concerns, because without a brain or central nervous system, the organisms may not technically qualify as embryos.
"Instead of growing an intact embryo, you could genetically reprogram the embryo to suppress growth in all the parts of the body except the bits you want, plus a heart and blood circulation," said Jonathan Slack, a Bath University embryologist.
Some scientists accuse Slack of meddling with nature.
"It's scientific fascism because we would be creating other beings whose
very existence would be to serve the dominant group," Oxford University
animal ethicist Professor Andrew Linzey said.
Copyright 1997, The Detroit News
dan@southeast.net
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Free Web-based e-mail groups -- http://www.eGroups.com