cloning

Weekly reads on organoids, COVID, CRISPR, cold chromatin, more

Cold-chromatin

As a researcher, is there ever enough time to get to everything that you want to read especially in newer areas like stem cells, organoids, and CRISPR, without even including non-scientific reads like Shakespeare or a new novel or something like that? Hopefully, putting together lists of recommended reads like today’s post is helpful. I […]

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Surprising reason why human cloning may produce someone else

Daisuke-Takakura-human-cloning

“If I’m going to the trouble of cloning myself, I want the clone to be a copy of me!” I’m imagining what someone might say if they were told that their expensive and ethically dubious personal cloning efforts produced a clone that was somebody else instead of them. Even if the clone was very similar

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Is monkey cloning a breakthrough or a bad idea?

Monkey-clones

Is monkey cloning a good idea? We’re about to find out. A new Cell paper today reports the first cloning of monkeys via somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), raising many questions. The paper from a team led by Qiang Sun is entitled, “Cloning of Macaque Monkeys by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer.” The highlight bullet points

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Americans relatively more comfortable with human cloning

Gallup-cloning

What is morally acceptable and where do we draw the line at behaviors that might just go too far such as human reproductive cloning? Over the years American attitudes have shifted on a number of potentially hot button moral behaviors including reproductive human cloning and pollsters including Gallup have tracked these attitudes. Gallup just came out

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Daisuke Takakura 高倉 大輔 Powerfully Captures Cloning

Human-cloning

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the future of human reproduction might be very different from today’s reality due to recent technological advances including cloning. Things like human cloning (the reproductive, “Star Wars” kind) and human genetic modification seem very real now. It feels almost imminent in a sense compared to the milleenia

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Are babies from same-sex couples possible?

IPS-cell-cloning

A question that has come up with advances in stem cell technology: could same-sex couples have their own biological children? Since Shinya Yamanaka reprogrammed first mouse and then human ordinary cells into powerful pluripotent stem cells, termed induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, back in 2006-2007 many new research avenues have opened up. The impossible suddenly

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Future of Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer to make ES Cells

NT-ESC-versus-IPSC

Advances in therapeutic cloning reported in the past year have been very exciting as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) can be used to produce very powerful human embryonic stem cells (ESC). These new cells are called NT-ESCs for short. Neither embryos nor reprogramming factors are needed to produce human NT-ESCs. See here, here and here for discussions of the pioneering papers reporting creation of

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Review of Mitalipov Nature paper: cloned ES cells vs iPS cells

NT-ESC

Just how good are human embryonic stem (ES) cells made by therapeutic cloning via nuclear transfer, with the successful technique first reported by the lab of Shoukhrat Mitalipov at OHSU last year? How do they compare to induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells or traditional ES cells made from IVF embryos? A new paper in Nature directly tackles these

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The main challenges for SCNT cloning of human embryonic stem cells

human-cloning1

It was intriguing last week to read about another advance in somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT)-based therapeutic cloning of human embryonic stem cells (hESC). The first such work was published last year by Mitalipov’s group from OHSU. This second paper to produce so-called nuclear transfer hESC (NT-hESC) made the important advance to show that it could

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