By BREITBART
Added: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 UTC

Thanks to EJ Ashcraft for the link.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080118194741.q60bzty8&show_article=1


A leading Vatican official on Friday condemned a US company's announcement that it had created cloned human embryos from adult skin cells.

The medical breakthrough could ultimately lead to the development of cures for Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's, and other untreatable ailments.

The experiments carried out by Stemagen Corp., a private company based in La Jolla, California, are the "worst exploitation of the human being which thus becomes an object of research," said Elio Sgreccia, who heads the Pontifical Academy for Life.

Sgreccia stressed that the experiments had "so far not been successful" and were also "a product of the past" as other recent experiments with human cells had been carried out without destroying embryos.

Stemagen Corp. used a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) to create the embryos.

In their experiments, the researchers removed the nuclei of mature egg cells from healthy young women who had previously donated eggs for successful infertility treatments.

Scientists then inserted DNA from an adult male donor into the eggs. DNA used in the experiment was retrieved from cells called fibroblasts, which are obtained from skin biopsies.

Several of the reconstructed eggs continued to develop as normal embryos, and three of the embryos were shown in genetic tests to have the same DNA as their male fibroblast donors.

"This study demonstrates, for the first time, that SCNT can be utilized to generate cloned human blastocysts using differentiated adult donor nuclei remodeled and reprogrammed by human oocytes," the researchers wrote in the study, which appear Thursday in the online edition of the journal "Stem Cells."

They believe that some key technical factors contributed to their successful results, including the use of freshly donated oocytes from successful egg donors.

Researchers said the breakthrough could lead to the creation of patient-specific embryonic stem cells for the development of treatment for as yet uncurable illnesses.

TAGGED: GENETICS, MORALITY, RELIGION