Three independent research teams have now used cloning technology to make human embryonic stem cells carrying the genomes of existing people. The first announcement, using genomes from fetal and infant cells, came last year1. The next two reports have emerged in the past month, detailing human embryonic stem cells that were custom made from cell samples derived from living adults, including a 75-year-old man2 and a 32-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes3.
This repeated cloning of embryos and generation of stem cells, now using cells collected from adults, increases the likelihood that human embryos will be produced to generate therapy for a specific individual. The creation of more human embryos for scientific experiments is certain. Regulatory structures must be in place to oversee it.
These accomplishments were made possible by numerous tweaks, and by mastery of difficult techniques and of the administrative work required to collect enough eggs from healthy young women. Each research team inserted nuclei taken from human skin cells into unfertilized eggs from which the original nuclei had been removed. These constructions...
The U.S. government must move “quickly and decisively” to avert substantial national security risks stemming from artificial intelligence (AI) which could, in the worst case, cause an “extinction-level threat to the human species,” says a report commissioned by the U.S...
By Nada Hassanein, New Jersey Monitor | 03.14.2024
Aggregated News
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration late last year approved two breakthrough gene therapies for sickle cell disease patients. Now a new federal program seeks to make these life-changing treatments available to patients with low incomes — and it could...
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