IT'S the acceptable face of human cloning: creating new cells and tissues to replace those lost to disease. But even the prospect of this "therapeutic cloning" has a troubling side. Every time a patient is treated, a cloned human embryo would be destroyeda tiny ball of cells admittedly, but a potential human life nonetheless.
Now a company linked to the team that created Dolly the sheep plans to overcome this ethical obstacle by removing the embryo step. It claims already to have promising results. And the technique wouldn't need to use human egg cells, which are scarce and in demand for IVF patients.
Therapeutic cloning could revolutionise the treatment of conditions such as Parkinson's disease. Doctors would take a healthy cell from the patient and fuse it with a human egg stripped of its own chromosomes to create a cloned embryo. A few days later, when the embryo has grown ...
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