Human Being Cloned?

L O N D O N,   Dec. 16 -- Scientists who created Dolly thesheep, the world’s first cloned animal, said on Wednesday theydid not believe South Korean researchers had cloned a humanembryo.

“We don’t believe they have provided any evidence that theyhave achieved what they claimed to have achieved,” Dr HarryGriffin, of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, said in atelephone interview. “The story is grossly overblown.”

Lee Bo-yon and researchers at Kyunghee University Hospitalin Seoul said on Wednesday that they had cultivated a humanembryo using an unfertilized egg and a somatic cell, those thatmake up most of the body, donated by a 30-year-old woman.

The Korean researchers said they aborted the experimentafter the human embryo divided into four cells.

“If implanted into a uterine wall of a carrier, we canassume that a human child would be formed and that it would havethe same gene characteristics as that of the donor,” Lee said.

Technically Possible Somatic cell transfer is the same technique the Roslinscientists used to create Dolly in 1996. Griffin said it wastechnically possible to clone a human embryo “but this group hasn’t done it.”

Humans start off as a single cell which then dividesrepeatedly, but it is only after three cell divisions that thenucleus takes over control of the development of the embryo.

“The Korean group stopped the experiment when they saw fourcells being produced so there is no evidence that the somaticcell they transferred was reprogrammed,” Griffin said.

He added that he and his colleagues were also puzzled aboutwhy Lee went ahead with the experiment now. They said there wasno indication that the Korean work was part of a large researchprogram and the South Korean government was consideringlegislation to control research on human cloning.

Not the First?

Griffin denied that Roslin scientists had already cloned ahuman embryo.