Ethical storm as scientist becomes first man to clone himself

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Ethical storm as scientist becomes first man to clone HIMSELF
By FIONA MACRAE - More by this author » Last updated at 22:00pm on 17th January 2008

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A scientist has achieved a world first... by cloning himself.

In a breakthrough certain to provoke an ethical furore, Samuel Wood created embryo copies of himself by placing his skin cells in a woman's egg.

The embryos were the first to be made from cells taken from adult humans.

Although they survived for only five days and were smaller than a pinhead, they are seen as a milestone in the quest for treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

But critics fear the technology could be exploited by mavericks to clone babies and accused the scientists of reducing the miracle of human life to a factory of spare parts.

Researchers from the Californian stem cell research company Stemagen employed the same technique used to make Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, to create the embryos.

They took eggs donated by young women having IVF and replaced genetic material with DNA from the skin cells of two men.

The eggs were then zapped with an electric current to induce fertilisation and the creation of embryos.

Some of the skin cells came from Dr Wood, Stemagen's chief executive officer and a leading fertility specialist, while the others came from another member of staff.

The result was a handful of embryos, at least three of them clones of Dr Wood and the other man.

Although all were destroyed in the process, the technique is seen as a vital step in the creation of cloned embryos rich in stem cells, which are "master cells" capable of becoming any type of body tissue.

More: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=508887&in_page_id=1965