From:
http://reuters.townnews.com/reuters/index.inn?story=/stories/-cloning.htm
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South Korea Human Clone Team To Release Proof Soon
By Nick Yon
SEOUL - The South Korean research team which claimed to have created an embryonic clone of an adult woman said Friday it would soon release evidence of its experiment in a bid to put to rest any lingeringskepticism.
"Conditions are very stressful for us at the present time," Dr Kim Seung-bo, who heads the research team at Seoul's Kyunghee University Hospital, told Reuters.
This Month Or Next Year
"We will disclose the evidence near the end of this month or early next year," he added.
Kim would not elaborate on the nature of the evidence, except to say it included photographs documenting the process of cultivating a human embryo using an unfertilized egg and a somatic or ordinary body cell from a woman in her 30s.
The Korean researchers said they aborted the experiment after witnessing the embryo divide into four cells, the stage at which infertility clinics such as theirs usually implant a test-tube embryo into a woman.
They said the embryo, if implanted into the uterine wall of a carrier, could form into a human child and could be "assumed" to have the same gene characteristics as that of the donor.
South Korean laws currently ban implantation of genetically engineered embryos in the womb.
The experiment enraged Korean civic groups.
Doubts By Western Exports
"I cannot be relieved of the suspicion (that the experiment) was conducted
to put Kyunghee University in the spotlight," said Park Byung-sang, head
of the Inchon Ecology Lab who led various civic groups
in a rally in downtown Seoul Friday.
"I believe it was motivated by greed to make quick money and gain fame...Can we produce half-humans in factories for our replacement parts?" he said, stressing that a social consensus needed to be created before such experiments.
The Korean researchers provoked a storm of controversy with the release of the results of an experiment that has taken human cloning further than other scientists have publicly admitted.
In the absence of a scientific paper, Western experts have cast doubts on it. One of the scientists in Edinburgh who helped clone Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, said he doubted the Korean team had actually cloned a human.
But others said it was likely the Kyunghee team managed to at least get it started.
"The fact that they went to four cells and they stopped it doesn't tell us how far it would go," said Neal First of the University of Wisconsin, who has created cross-species clones of several animals using eggs from cows.
"But I think it says the technology that they used is probably capable of doing something," he said.
First said he did not doubt the South Korean team did in fact clone a human cell -- which they let divide twice before stopping the process.
Lori Andrews, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law and a specialist in the ethics of cloning, said this experiment, combined with news that Japanese scientists cloned eight calves, showed it was no longer impossible to clone human beings.
"Between the Japanese cows and the South Korean report, this suggests that efficacy issues no longer apply (and) it will readily move to the next stage of being able to implant. And any IVF clinic will be able to do that," she said. "I think someone is just going to do it."
The Kyunghee researchers said they would not press ahead until South Korea's legislators decided the legal and ethical questions surrounding the cloning of humans.
dan@southeast.net
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