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Embryonic Stem Cell Researchers Question Cloning
Even many scientists who support embryonic stem cell (ESC) research have
expressed serious doubts that so-called therapeutic cloning will ever lead to
real therapies for patients:
"[T]he poor availability of human oocytes, the low efficiency of the nuclear
transfer procedure, and the long population-doubling time of human ES cells make
it difficult to envision this [embryo cloning to produce stem cells] becoming a
routine clinical procedure..."
--J.S. Odorico, D.S. Kaufman, J.A. Thomson, "Multilineage differentiation from
human embryonic stem cell lines," Stem Cells 19, 193-204; 2001
"...[T]he use of such therapeutic cloning to produce useful treatments may
simply be impractical...'It's too laborious and costly to employ as a routine
therapeutic procedure,' said Dr. Alan Colman, research director at"[I]t may come
as a surprise that many experts do not now expect therapeutic cloning to have a
large clinical impact...many researchers have come to doubt whether therapeutic
cloning will ever be efficient enough to be commercially viable. 'It would be
astronomically expensive,' says James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin in
Madison, who led the team that first isolated E[mbryonic] S[tem] cells from
human blastocysts."
--"Can they rebuild us?" Nature, April 5, 2001, pp. 622-5.
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