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Harvard defies Bush with therapeutic cloning program
The Australian
June 8, 2006

THE richest university in the US has thrown its reputation and financial resources behind efforts to clone human embryos for medical science.

Scientists at Harvard University were yesterday awarded ethical approval and private funds to pursue therapeutic cloning experiments that are strongly opposed by the Bush administration and the US's religious Right.

The researchers hope their work could lead to cures for conditions such as diabetes and motor neurone disease.

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

The work is 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. The Bush administration has campaigned for a global ban on all forms of human cloning.

The approval at Harvard is particularly significant because of the university's vast reputation and wealth. The university, the richest in the world, took more than two years to vet the ethical and scientific credentials of the project.

Harvard president Larry Summers said: "While we respect the beliefs of those who oppose this research, we are equally sincere in our belief that the life-and-death medical needs of suffering children and adults justify moving forward with this research."

The research will be led by scientists Douglas Melton, Thomas Dudley, Kevin Eggan and George Daley.

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. Were these to divide to form clones, they would be genetically identical to the patients, and carry mutations linked to the conditions.

The cloned embryos would then be used to create embryonic stem cells, which could be grown into specialised adult cells that mimic the diseases in question.

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. "We can then study the disease using these cells, correct their genetic defects and coax the repaired cells to become normal blood cells."

The Times

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