But creating a cloned embryo requires human egg cells, and egg cells aren't cheap.
Cells would be removed from someone with, say Parkinson's, and injected into a donated egg to create a cloned embryo.
Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, told his colleagues that calls for quick legislative action were unwarranted because there wasn't a clear enough understanding of the process that led to the reported creation of the cloned embryo.
The achievement is a long way from creating a cloned human embryo.
Earlier this week a team in the U.S. led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research Center, announced they had created the first cloned monkey embryo and extracted stem cells from it.
It still took hundreds the last time the Koreans announced that they had cloned a human embryo.
On Thursday a team of researchers at Newcastle University in the UK, which hopes to join South Korea in the forefront of stem cell research, also said they had successfully cloned an human embryo.
These cells are then cloned to create an embryo, and then embryonic stem cells that are genetically inclined to discover this disease.
Could patients have themselves cloned in order to harvest cells from a genetically-identical embryo, gaining a donor and avoiding the major problem of transplant surgery: rejection of foreign tissue by the immune system?
By studying the expression patterns of individual genes, cloners have found that certain genes which should be turned on in early development, such as those that control the implantation of the embryo into the uterus, are activated much later in cloned embryos.
In Dolly's case, those cells were allowed to continue developing into an embryo that was then transferred to a ewe to produce a cloned sheep.
Dolly the sheep -- the first cloned animal -- was created over 10 years ago, and the only previous claim of human embryo cloning by South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang in 2004, was discredited.
应用推荐