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FROM Reuters: "U.S. Company Says It Cloned Human Embryo for Cells" By Maggie Fox " WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. company said on Sunday it had cloned a human embryo in a breakthrough aimed not at creating a human being but at mining the embryo for stem cells used to treat disease. It is the first time anyone has reported successfully cloning a human embryo, and biotechnology company Advanced Cell Technology Inc., based in Worcester, Massachusetts, said it hopes the experiment will lead to tailored treatments for diseases ranging from Parkinson's to juvenile diabetes. ``Our intention is not to create cloned human beings, but rather to make lifesaving therapies for a wide range of human disease conditions, including diabetes, strokes, cancer, AIDS and neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease '' Dr. Robert Lanza, vice president of medical and scientific development at ACT, said in a statement. However, the announcement drew immediate criticism from those fearing the step would lead to human cloning. Congress has moved to outlaw all human cloning. A proposed new law is under consideration by the Senate. Advanced Cell Technology said it had used cloning technology to grow a tiny ball of cells that could then be used as a source of stem cells. Embryonic stem cells are a kind of master cell that can grow into any kind of cell in the body. ``Scientifically, biologically, the entities we are creating are not individuals. They're only cellular life. They're not human life,'' Michael West, chief executive officer of ACT, told NBC's Meet the Press. Federal law prohibits the use of taxpayer money for the cloning of human beings but Advanced Cell Technologies is a privately funded company and can do as it pleases. ACT Vice President Joe Cibelli, who led the research, said his team had used classic cloning technology using a human egg and a human skin cell. They scraped the DNA out of the egg cell and replaced it with DNA from the nucleus of the adult cell. The egg started to grow as if it had been fertilized by a sperm, but instead of becoming a baby it became a ball of cells. The same technology has been used to clone sheep, cattle and monkeys. The company did not say whether it had successfully removed embryonic stem cells from the cloned embryo. Both cloning and stem cell technology are highly controversial areas of research in the United States. Stem cells are valued by scientists because they could be used to treat many diseases, including cancer and AIDS. They can come from adults but the most flexible sources so far seem to be very early embryos -- so small they are only a ball of a few cells. Such embryos -- usually left over from attempts to make test-tube babies -- are destroyed in the process, so many people oppose it. President Bush decided earlier this year that federal funds could be used for research on embryonic stem cells, but only on those that had been created before August, found at 11 different academic and private laboratories. When combined with cloning technology, the hope is that patients themselves could be the source of their own tissue or organs, a technology known as therapeutic cloning. ``Human therapeutic cloning could be used for a host of age-related diseases,'' said West. ``If the human cells behave as animal cells have in previous studies, we may have found a means of rebuilding the lifespan of cells at the same time. This would allow us to supply young cells of any kind, identical to the patient, that could be used to address the tidal wave of age-related disease that will accompany the aging of the population.'' The reaction was quick and furious from Congress, where both cloning and stem cell technology have been debated at length in recent years. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said he did not yet quite understand what ACT had done. ``But it's disconcerting, frankly,'' Daschle said on Fox News Sunday. ``I think it's going in the wrong direction.'' ``I believe it will be a big debate, but at the end of the day I don't think we're going to let the cloning of human embryos go on,'' Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby , a Republican, told NBC's ``Meet the Press''. Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy said he agreed. ''I find it very, very troubling and I think most of the Congress would,'' Leahy, a Democrat, told NBC. The company said it had created only a single six-celled embryo. But West said that had the embryo been placed in a woman's womb, it could possibly have grown into a human being. ``We took extreme measures to ensure that a cloned human could not result from this technology,'' he said." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn