Scientists reported Wednesday that for the first time they had used cloning techniques to generate embryonic stem cells containing the genes of specific patients.
The step marks a possibly pivotal advance toward the long-sought goal of creating stem cells that could be used to treat many major diseases because they would not be rejected by patients’ immune systems.
Stem cell breakthrough
The experiments, which produced genetically abnormal cells useful only for research, have raised new concerns in a field rife with ethical, moral and political quandaries.
For the first time, scientists paid women for their eggs to use for human embryonic stem cell research, stirring worries about women being exploited and putting their health at risk. And they made the stem cells by producing and then destroying mutant embryos. Because of their genetic abnormalities, those embryos could not have survived. Their moral status immediately became the subject of debate.
“They have created human embryos. They are abnormal, but they are still human embryos,” said Daniel P. Sulmasy, a professor of medicine and ethics at the University of Chicago. “Anyone who is opposed to the deliberate creation and destruction of human embryos, as I am, would be opposed to this research.”
Many other bioethicists, researchers and advocates, however, hailed the work as meticulously done and an important scientific advance that is ethically justifiable.
“I think it will teach us a lot of how to control the generation of all the different cell types that we would like to study and use for therapy,” said Lawrence Goldstein, who directs the stem cell research program at the University of California at San Diego. “I think it’s a really exciting development.”
Supporters of human embryonic stem cell research consider the field one of the most promising in biomedical research. Because it is thought that the cells are able to morph into virtually any tissue in the body, researchers hope they will lead to cures for many afflictions, including diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and paralysis. But the field is highly controversial, primarily because the cells are usually derived by destroying embryos, which some consider equivalent to killing a person.
Since the cells were isolated in 1998, researchers have been trying to create stem cells that could be used to generate cells, tissue or replacement body parts that would contain the genes of the patients who would receive them, avoiding rejection by a recipient’s immune system.
This process, sometimes known as “therapeutic cloning,” uses the same techniques that cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996. Genes from an adult are transferred into an egg that has had its genetic material plucked out. Scientists then stimulate the egg with its new genes to begin developing into an embryo so they can harvest stem cells.
Although researchers have done that for many species, attempts in people have been repeatedly stymied or marred by questionable or fraudulent claims of success. In 2004, a South Korean scientist claimed to have produced a stem cell line derived from a cloned human embryo. The announcement excited scientists and potential patients but raised fears that the techniques used in non-humans might be used to create embryos that could be placed into a woman’s womb to develop. It turned out to be a fraud.
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