Sunday, March 25, 2007

"Debate on interspecies cloning reignites"

I'm usually all for medical and technological advances, but the creep factor is all over this story.

At least three respected teams of British scientists have reignited the moral debate over inserting human genes into animal eggs by proposing experiments similar to [Jose] Cibelli's.

Their goal is to eliminate the need for women to donate eggs for the cloning of human embryos, a research goal they say will enable them to better understand the genetic causes of many diseases and design personalized medicines.

...

But Cibelli, who will soon publish data in a scientific journal detailing his failure to clone monkey genes in a cow eggs, doubts the proposed experiments will work.

"It could be that we are doing something wrong," Cibelli said. "But it looks like the farther apart the species are on the evolutionary tree, the harder it will be to clone."


This is the stuff of science fiction. Or, should I say, Sci Fi.

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