Harvard starts privately-funded human cloning

From the UK Times:

The world's richest university has put its clout behind medical research opposed by President Bush.

AMERICA’S richest university threw its reputation and financial resources behind efforts to clone human embryos for medical science yesterday.

Scientists at Harvard University were awarded ethical approval and private funds to pursue therapeutic cloning experiments, which are strongly opposed by the Bush Administration and the Religious Right. Researchers hope that they could lead to cures for conditions such as diabetes and motor neuron disease.

The Harvard team will seek to clone embryos using cells from patients with these disorders, and then to create “disease-specific” colonies of embryonic stem cells that can be used to develop new treatments.

The work is hugely contentious in the US, where experiments on embryonic stem cells created since 2001 cannot receive federal funding and attempts to outlaw the use of cloning for medical research have narrowly failed to pass in Congress.

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It is also one of the first therapeutic cloning projects to be started since the disgrace of Woo Suk Hwang, the South Korean scientist found last year to have faked his data.

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The university, which has an endowment of $27 billion, which makes it the richest in the world, took more than two years to vet the ethical and scientific credentials of the project before deciding to give it its support. The project is the first of its kind in the US that will be conducted without commercial backing.

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The initial goal is to take nuclei from adult cells belonging to patients with these diseases, and to transplant them into eggs from which DNA has been removed.

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In the longer term the aim is to develop cloned embryonic stem cells for transplant as “spare-part tissue” that would be genetically matched to patients.

“We plan to take skin cells from a patient with a genetic disease and reprogram that skin cell back to its embryonic state,” Dr Daley said. [source]