How does animal cloning work, and could human cloning become a reality soon? This came to mind again because of a recent piece in The Atlantic. Apparently, animal cloning is now so common that there are even races of horses that are clones of each other. Camel cloning is also a thing. Animal cloning expands […]
Deja ewe or eww: expansive animal cloning raises some difficult questions Read More »
A tech entrepreneur named Cathy Tie is talking about eventually making gene-edited babies in the U.S. via something she is calling the Manhattan Project. What should we make of this? The fact that she recently married He Jiankui who made those three CRISPR’d babies is relevant here even if they may have recently also gotten
Cathy Tie, He Jiankui’s ex-wife, starts ‘Manhattan Project’ to make CRISPR babies Read More »
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
Weekly reads on organoids, COVID, CRISPR, cold chromatin, more Read More »
“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
Surprising reason why human cloning may produce someone else Read More »
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
Is monkey cloning a breakthrough or a bad idea? Read More »
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
Americans relatively more comfortable with human cloning Read More »
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
Daisuke Takakura 高倉 大輔 Powerfully Captures Cloning Read More »
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
Are babies from same-sex couples possible? Read More »
Remember that old TV show the Odd Couple with very proper Felix Unger and his polar opposite Oscar Madison who has all kinds of baggage? They’ve cloned it into a remake to be on TV soon here in the US in 2015. It seems only fitting then that actual human cloning research has a new
The Odd Couple of Cloning Research: Mitalipov & Woo Suk Hwang Unite Read More »
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
Future of Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer to make ES Cells Read More »