British set to reignite debate on inter-species cloning

Following up on a nearly ten year old experiment by Jose Cibelli, a team of U.K. scientists stir up the debate on human cloning.

Jose Cibelli was a University of Michigan researcher who injected his own DNA into a cow's egg in a cloning attempt that even outraged President Clinton.

There are few scientists who pursue human cloning experiments due to a lack of available female human eggs. This is why these scientists have been debating over using another species, a cow, eggs in an attempt to clone humans.

All three U.K. teams aim to get around that bottleneck by taking DNA from patients sick with a disease like Alzheimer's and fuse it with cow eggs that have had all their genetic material removed. The hope is that the human DNA will trick the eggs into thinking they're pregnant, beginning development.

After about five days of growth, the cloned embryos would be destroyed and the stem cells extracted. The stem cells would be grown in their labs and the researchers could look for the onset of diseases, study their development and test experimental drugs on the cells.

Cloning has proven to be very inefficient since any attempt at human cloning will require a steady supply of human female eggs. Even with willing donors, the process is still very difficult because women who donate eggs have to undergo hormone injections, and this can be risky.

However, inter-species cloning is still viewed as immoral by many scientists because this type of cloning is seen as treating a human in the early stages of development as nothing more than a tool.

On the other hand, many other scientists point out the benefits of human cloning such as the possible development of new drugs, finding cures for diseases, and even studying diseases at their earliest stages to better understand how they work.

Whatever side of the debate you fall on regarding inter-species cloning, Jose Cibelli doubts that inter-species cloning will work because it appears that the further apart species are on the evolutionary tree, the harder it will be to clone a species by using eggs from a total different species.

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