Human Embryonic Cells Cloned By Koreans
Scientists in Seoul develop line that can help disease research

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Thursday, February 12, 2004

For the first time in the brief history of stem cell research, Korean scientists are reporting they have cloned human
embryonic tissue cells -- a major new step down the long road toward innovative treatments for a host of intractable
diseases.

The unique line of human embryonic cells is capable of being transformed into every type of cell that makes up all the
body's tissues and organs, an achievement that does not involve the cloning of humans.

The versatile cells were harvested from microscopic clusters of embryonic cells produced from the nucleus of eggs
donated by volunteer women. Such cell clusters -- known as "blastocysts" -- had been cloned, but they originated in
other cells not directly involved in human reproduction, the scientists report.

Although years of further research will be needed before the scientific achievement could lead to treatments for human
disease, a new pathway has opened to repairing damaged tissues, attacking such degenerative disorders as diabetes,
Parkinson's and osteoarthritis, and revolutionizing the field of transplant medicine, the scientists and other experts
say.

But American scientists warn that renewed political fire could flare over the research because of public confusion
between this type of work and claims that it involves a disguised version of a procedure that could result in cloning
human babies.

President Bush, after much controversy, has already sharply limited the types of stem cell research that can legally be
conducted in the United States. And though scientists draw a sharp distinction between "therapeutic cloning" and
"reproductive cloning" -- they strongly support the former and even more strongly oppose any efforts toward the latter -
- many religious groups make no distinction between the two.

The research team reporting its new work is headed by Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul National University in Korea and includes
13 other Korean scientists and one from Michigan State University. Their results are being published today in Science
Express, the online version of the journal Science.

"This is a truly important finding," said Irving Weissman, a pioneer Stanford stem cell researcher in a telephone
interview from Canada. "It will have the most important consequences, particularly in enabling us to study a whole
range of genetically involved diseases -- like Alzheimer's and Lou Gehrig's, and all the auto-immune disorders, where
we have known that genes are involved in some way."

Weissman also commented on the political aspects of the research: "Why do you suppose this vitally important work was
done in Korea, and not in America?" he asked. "It's because President Bush's executive order limiting the stem cell
lines that American researchers can use would make it impossible for any scientist here to try it. We are blocked from
even starting down this research road."

Although the Korean scientists maintained their techniques would not be applicable for human cloning, it does appear to
make the birth of cloned babies more possible in the hands of other scientists with no ethical scruples, some
scientists say.

The Korean team collected a total of 242 eggs from 16 unpaid volunteer women in Seoul and removed the nucleus from some
of the women's eggs. Then they replaced the nuclei with non-reproductive cells called cumulus cells, cultured them and
cloned them until they yielded 30 blastocysts, which began maturing into clusters of 100 to 150 cells.

Then, the scientists isolated the inner cell mass from 20 of the blastocysts, and from those clusters they derived a
single line of the all-purpose cells that are known pluripotent stem cells -- so-called because they can turn into
virtually every other variety of cells that make up the human body.

The technique used by the Korean team to clone their human embryonic cell cultures yielded far more cells than any
other research team has reported, scientists noted. The Korean group's sole American, Jose B. Cibelli of Michigan
State, was once vice president for research at a biotech firm called Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass.,
which claimed three years ago to have grown human blastocysts to the very early six-cell stage. Its published work was
criticized as essentially a negative result at the time, however.

The Korean report also contained another unique and highly significant aspect: Since the stem cells contained the same
genes as the original women who voluntarily contributed their eggs, Hwang and his colleagues suggested that their
technique posed the long-term possibility of deriving stem cells from a single individual with a specific disease and
then using those stem cells to grow new tissues that would not be rejected by the patient's immune system.

For that reason Hwang and his colleagues say their work holds promise in the very long term for yielding important
advances in transplantation medicine.

SOURCE: Page A - 1 San Francisco Chronicle, CA
http://tinyurl.com/2cajy

* * *

----------------------------------------------------------------------
To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn