Cloning has arrived...

While the US sleeps, leading-edge stem cell research is being done at Seoul National University. (Well, at least California has woken up and is trying to counter the Bush administration's lack of support for stem cell research by using state funds.)

The Korean lab can produce one clone per 17 donor eggs. That means the cost per clone is similar to that of an IVF cycle - or less than $5k. I imagine in a decade wealthy people (perhaps everyone?) will have access to a supply of their own stem cells. Also, women who are past reproductive age could choose to have a clone child, using their own or a relative or friend's genetic material.

Of course, some US religious fundamentalists (like our president) will fight these developments. Are we ready for the coming clone war?

NYT: "In what scientists say is a stunning leap forward, a team of South Korean researchers has developed a highly efficient recipe for producing human embryos by cloning and then extracting their stem cells.

Writing today in the journal Science, they report that they used their method to produce 11 human stem cells lines that are genetic matches of 11 patients aged 2 to 56.

Previously, the same group, led by Dr. Woo Suk Hwang and Dr. Shin Yong Moon of Seoul National University, produced a single stem cell line from a cloned embryo, but the process was so onerous that scientists said it was not worth trying to repeat it, and some doubted the South Koreans' report was even correct.

Now things have changed.

"It is a tremendous advance," said Dr. Leonard Zon, a stem cell researcher at Harvard Medical School and president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, who was not involved in the research.

The method, called therapeutic cloning, is one of the great hopes of the stem cell field. It produces stem cells, universal cells that are extracted from embryos, killing the embryos in the process, and, in theory, can be directed to grow into any of the body's cell types. And since the stem cells come from embryos that are clones of individuals, they should be exact genetic matches. Scientists want to obtain such stem cells from patients to study the origin of diseases and to develop replacement cells that would be identical to ones a patient has lost.

...But this time, with a handful of technical improvements that mostly involved such things as methods for growing cells and breaking open embryos, they used an average of 17 eggs per stem cell line and could almost guarantee success with a single woman's eggs obtained in a single month. And it did not matter if the patient whose cells were being cloned was young or middle aged, male or female, sick or well - the process worked.

"You almost have no reason not to do it," said Dr. Davor Solter, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology in Freiberg, Germany.

In fact, Dr. Solter added, it now looks like it is much more efficient to clone and obtain human stem cells than it is to do the same experiment in animals."