It's a Blastocyst, Not a Baby

Harvard researchers announced last week that they will proceed with plans to create cloned human embryos to be used for embryonic stem cell extraction. The Harvard Stem Cell Institute's project will be funded with private donations, as Federal research money cannot be used for such experiments.

HSCI intends to ask healthy women in the Boston area, where the Institute is based, to donate their eggs to the research program. The women will receive no compensation for their donation. Once the eggs are harvested, the nuclei of the eggs are removed. DNA from another patient's cell is then inserted into the egg and permitted to grow for a few days. A blastocyst is the result -- a tiny ball of cells about the size of a pinhead. Embryonic stem cells are retrieved from the blastocyst and continue to grow in a culture medium. Embryonic stem cells are unique in that they can be prompted to develop into any specialized cell in our body. For example, you might have a petri dish of stem cells that are prompted to grow into cardiac cells; other stem cells in the lab might be influenced to develop into pancreatic or neural cells. The thought, then, is to transfer the healthy cardiac, pancreatic, or neural cells back into a patient that might be suffering from heart disease, diabetes, or Parkinsons disease, eventually (and hopefully) curing those ailments.

The Harvard researchers will join a growing number of scientists around the world that are working to clone human embryos, including the University of California - San Francisco, who also recently added their proverbial hat to the cloning ring. Thus far, only one group (in the UK) have successfully cloned a human embryo to the blastocyst stage; however, they did not extract any embryonic stem cells.