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ANOTHER crack is forming in the increasingly fragmented world of stem cell technology. Last week, Chris Shaw and his colleagues at King's College London said they thought that it might be possible to derive stem cells from embryos cloned using rabbit eggs - one way to get over the shortage of human eggs for research. One team, led by Hui-Zhen Sheng at the Shanghai Second Medical University in China, claims to have already succeeded in taking ESCs from such rabbit-human "embryos" (New Scientist, 23 August 2003, p 14). But now Bob Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts, has raised doubts about the procedure, since no one has been able to replicate Sheng's results. "If you try it, the embryos block at the 16-cell stage," he says. The search for an alternative source of eggs intensified after it emerged last month that Korean "cloning king" Woo Suk Hwang faked results in which he claimed to have derived patient-specific stem cells from embryos created from just 17 eggs. In fact he failed to create such stem cells despite having access to 2000 human eggs. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn