A lot has happened in the week since the first human embryo genetic modification paper was published by a team led by Junjiu Huang. There have been a number of new events just in the last few days. Jocelyn Kaiser over at SCIENCEINSIDER has a new piece reporting a couple important developments including that the journal that published the human embryo editing paper, Protein & Cell, has issued an editorial explaining the review process for the paper. They argue that the review was fast, but …Read More
dual use dilemma cloning
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 be done using adult and even old human somatic cells. This is a reproducible technology, which is very important. However, key challenges and concerns remain for human therapeutic cloning …Read More