Stemagen, a private company in La Jolla, Calif., has published a paper in which its scientists claim they have successfully created cloned human embryos. If you think you have heard this announcement before, you are right.
Just about two years ago, a team of scientists at Seoul National University in Korea announced in the journal Science that they had cloned human embryos and had gotten stem cells to grow from them. The Korean work could not be replicated. Eventually Hwang woo-suk, the lead scientist involved, admitted he had lied. There were no cloned embryos. He resigned his university position in complete disgrace.
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The only way to prove that Stemagen team has succeeded in making a human embryo — 10 years after the cloning of Dolly — is for someone else to replicate what they did. That will take some time.
The California group was very cautious in presenting the evidence in its just-released paper. Scientists checked the DNA carefully in the donor cells from which DNA was taken and in the embryos which were cloned from that DNA to make sure it was the same. And they had an independent laboratory confirm the result.
There are enough checks and balances reported in the paper — and a keen awareness by the authors of the fraud perpetrated by the South Korean group — to believe that they are really the first to achieve the cloning of human embryos in a verified, peer-reviewed process.
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