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The first so-called “DNA cloning” was performed in 1972 by Molecular Biologist Paul Berg who integrated and expanded a quimeric gene - a mixture of both bacterial and viral origin. Since then, Escherichia Coli (a Gram negative bacterium that is commonly found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded animals; vegetal cloning (largely used in agronomy since the mid-1960s), and animal cloning (from reptiles, fish and amphibian) have been instrumental in paving the way to the successful cloning of mammals since 1986, which cleared the way for human reproductive cloning, leading us to the scientists who vehemently oppose the practice.....

SFAHAN, Iran — Iranian scientists have become the first in the Middle East to clone a cow as part of the country's stem cell research, the leader of the project said Saturday. The male cow, named Bonyana, was born Saturday in the city of Isfahan in central Iran, said Dr. Mohammed Hossein Nasr e Isfahani, head of the Royan Research Institute. Besides its nuclear activity and nascent space program, Iran has sought to highlight advances in other technologies such as cloning and medicine. The government set a goal to become a regional leader in advanced sciences and technology by 2025....

Women who say they don't need a man may well be right – after human sperm was created in the lab. The breakthrough could give hope to infertile couples and men left unable to have children after having cancer treatment. But don't worry guys, the scientists who created the sperm using stem cells don't plan to take you out of the baby-making process just yet. 'While we can understand some people may have concerns, this does not mean that humans can be produced in a dish and we have no intention of doing this,' said researcher Prof Karim Nayernia. 'The...

Michael Jackson 'obsessed with cloning himself' Michael Jackson was obsessed with immortality and the idea of cloning himself, according to his former chauffeur Al Bowman. 07 Jul 2009 The King of Pop reportedly attended a Las Vegas conference on human cloning with longtime friend Uri Geller, according to Mr Bowman. Mr Bowman, who drove the pair to the event in 2002, said Jackson was particularly impressed with a group called the Raelians, who believe the key to eternal life is cloning. Jackson's reaction following the conference, Mr Bowman said: "Jackson was very excited. "He bounced out of that conference like...

Introduction In today's humanistic culture, individuals are tinkering with ethical boundaries in science, namely genetics, pushing research and experimentation to the limit. In 1973, the monumental court case, Roe v. Wade, altered the bioethical playing field in the United States forever. For the first time in history, a mother could kill her unborn child without any legal consequences. Years later, a sheep named Dolly was cloned in a Scottish laboratory, and scientists around the world claimed they could clone human beings next. Likewise, stem cell research is one of the pivotal debates of the twenty-first century. In-vitro fertilization poses severe...

Some research advocates and scientists are upset that techniques they support would get no federal money. Many scientists hoped President Obama would end what they saw as the politicization of embryonic stem cell research. They thought all Bush administration funding bans would vanish, easing the way for unimpeded research that could yield interventions for physicians to use in treating everything from Parkinson's disease to diabetes. But those hopes may be running into political reality.The National Institutes of Health in April proposed overturning some Bush-era restrictions on federal funding for stem cell research while leaving others in place. The rules would...

James Dewey Watson is an American molecular biologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. In a 1971 article to the medical established, recently re-published– he wrote that “the embryological development of man does not occur free in the placid environment of a freshwater pond. Instead, the crucial steps in human embryology always occur in the highly inaccessible womb of a human female.” This profound statement has been turned upside down with new reproductive technologies - technologies which has created unforeseen possibilities of experimental manipulation of the human reproduction process. Watson’s comment was based in...

SEOUL, South Korea – South Korean scientists say they have engineered four beagles that glow red using cloning techniques that could help develop cures for human diseases. The four dogs, all named "Ruppy" — a combination of the words "ruby" and "puppy" — look like typical beagles by daylight. But they glow red under ultraviolet light, and the dogs' nails and abdomens, which have thin skins, look red even to the naked eye.

A United States-based fertility doctor claimed to have cloned 14 human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of four women. In an interview published on Wednesday, Panayiotis Zavos told Britain’s Independent newspaper that although none of the women had had a viable pregnancy as a result, the first cloned baby could now be born within a couple of years. “There is absolutely no doubt about it... the cloned child is coming. There is absolutely no way that it will not happen,” he said, quoted by the paper. “If we intensify our efforts, we can have a cloned...

Happy April Fool's day, here's your prank. Ben & Jerry's, the autonomous Unilever subsidiary with the environmental bent, celebrated every reporter's favorite holiday with a spoof Web site for a fictional company called "Cyclone Dairy" whose milk and other products comes entirely from cloned cows. "Today, cloning is more than a reality," the site's homepage says. "It’s a promise for a more wholesome world. CyClone will be the first dairy brand to offer great-tasting products made exclusively from cloned cows." The joke is playing off guidance from the Food and Drug Administration that will allow companies to use clones in...

"President Barack Obama says human cloning is ‘dangerous, profoundly wrong' and has no place in society." So claimed the President as he lifted the restriction on embryonic stem cell research. To be clear, the restriction imposed by former President Bush didn't ban embryonic stem cell research -- it banned the use of Federal dollars in such research. President Obama's statement that human cloning is "dangerous and wrong" is a non sequitur in its context, because there is no material difference between abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and cloning. They differ in appearance, they sometimes differ in ends, but they differ...

Here's the final installment of the E-mail debate between conservative Catholic legal scholars Robby George and Doug Kmiec over whether President Obama's executive order on embryonic stem cell research authorizes federally funded human cloning. In the first E-mail in this post, Kmiec responds to George's point-by-point analysis of Obama's new embryonic stem cell research policy, arguing that Obama's policy will very likely outlaw human cloning. In the second E-mail, George closes the debate by decrying Kmiec's definition of human cloning and invites him to debate the matter in public.

<p>Last week, the White House invited me to a signing ceremony overturning the Bush (43) executive order on stem cell research. I assume this was because I have long argued in these columns and during my five years on the President's Council on Bioethics that, contrary to the Bush policy, federal funding should be extended to research on embryonic stem cell lines derived from discarded embryos in fertility clinics.</p>

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama says human cloning is "dangerous, profoundly wrong" and has no place in society. Obama made the comments as he was signing an executive order that will allow federal spending on embryonic stem cell research.

LONDON: The ethical aspect notwithstanding, an Italian doctor has claimed to have cloned three human babies who are "healthy" and now living in eastern Europe. "I helped give birth to three children with the human cloning technique. It involved two boys and a girl who are nine years old today. They were born healthy and they are in excellent health now," the Daily Telegraph quoted Severino Antinori as telling the 'Oggi' weekly. "The women's eggs were impregnated in a laboratory through a method called 'nuclear transfer'," he said, adding that the method used was "an improvement" over the technique used...

  Extinct Ibex Clone Dies at Birth by Brian Thomas, M.S.* The last of a type of wild mountain goat was found dead in the mountains of northern Spain in 2000. The Pyrenean ibex, characterized by its curved horns, was officially declared extinct, but not before tissue samples were collected and preserved in liquid nitrogen.Scientists used DNA extracted from the samples and, replacing the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, cloned a female Pyrenean ibex—the first extinct animal to be cloned. Unfortunately, the clone died shortly after birth “due to physical defects in its lungs. Other cloned animals, including...

For the first time, scientists have succeeded in recreating an extinct breed of Spanish mountain goat, the ibex, thereby bringing an animal back from extinction. For seven minutes, then the laboratory creation died again.

Enlarge ImageBad programming. These hybrid embryos, in which human DNA has been placed in animal eggs, don't turn on the same genes as human embryos. Credit: ACT/Cloning and Stem Cells Can a person be cloned? And can human-animal hybrid embryos produce stem cells that shed light on human diseases? "Probably" and "no" are the respective answers to these provocative questions, according to a study out today. Ever since researchers cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996 by transferring the nucleus of one of her cells into the nucleus-free egg of another sheep, scientists, ethicists, politicians, and the public have wondered...

Federal regulators have green-lighted the first trial of an embryonic stem-cell treatment in humans. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the go-ahead for Geron Corporation to start a phase I safety trial of its therapy GRNOPC1 for spinal cord injuries, the Menlo Park, Calif.–based company announced today. It first sought permission for the trial four years ago and spent much of the last year trying to satisfy the FDA’s concerns about it. "This marks the beginning of what is potentially a new chapter in medical therapeutics—one that reaches beyond pills to a new level of healing: the restoration...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers who tried to use mouse, cow and rabbit eggs to make human clones said on Monday the effort failed to produce workable embryos but added that they showed human cloning should work in principle. Mixing human and animal cells does not appear to program the egg properly, said Dr. Robert Lanza of Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology.

Family Research Council recognizes and respects the inherent dignity of every human life from conception (whether by natural or artificial means) until death. FRC desires to help build a culture of life, holding that all human life is a gift to be treasured. The life of every human being is an intrinsic good, not something whose value is conditional upon its usefulness to others or to the state.Threats to human life include abortion, euthanasia, and many new forms of biotechnology. However, human beings need not prove their moral worth by demonstrating sentience, or self-awareness, or a certain level of cognitive...

The connection between politics and eschatology (Christ’s second coming) is little known to all but a few today. This enables many whacky and sometimes dangerous political figures to slip in un-noticed by a slumbering and apostate church. That even those politicians don’t know the role they are playing offers little consolation. How can we avoid this? Between Hollywood, the new craze for Christian novels (fiction) and the old series of “Left Behind” flicks the average person, Christian or not, has been shown a picture of last day’s figures and personalities that is anything but accurate. Pictures of the antichrist and...

Australian team has copied parts of DNA but faces huge odds A team of Australian scientists pledged yesterday to salve their country's conscience by bringing a cloned Tasmanian tiger back to the island where it was hunted to extinction more than 60 years ago. They announced that they had succeeded in copying small fragments of DNA from pickled tiger pups, suggesting that it might one day be possible to assemble the animal's entire set of genes and clone it back into existence. "We are now further ahead than any other project that has attempted anything remotely similar using extinct DNA,"...

THE recipe for making any creature is written in its DNA. So last November, when geneticists published the near-complete DNA sequence of the long-extinct woolly mammoth, there was much speculation about whether we could bring this behemoth back to life. Creating a living, breathing creature from a genome sequence that exists only in a computer's memory is not possible right now. But someone someday is sure to try it, predicts Stephan Schuster, a molecular biologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and a driving force behind the mammoth genome project. So besides the mammoth, what other extinct beasts might we...

With one ear flopped forward and her tongue dangling in anticipation of another item to fetch, Mira seemed like any other playful pup scampering around Eastwood Park in Tamalpais Valley. But proud owner Lou Hawthorne of Mill Valley said Mira - the world's first cloned pet dog - signals a new horizon in genetics. The border collie/husky just turned 1 year old. "I'm delighted we're here at this milestone," said Hawthorne, who spent a decade trying to clone his family's dog that died in 2002. "During the process of creating her, it was a goal. But once I had Mira...

Putting new computers together from scratch is relatively easy. A much bigger trick is totally moving an existing software system including the OS and every piece of software on the computer to a totally new hardware base. Symantec offers a commercial product (Ghost) which is supposed to do that but which is problematical for several reasons. The Free Software Foundation offers a stunningly good piece of software along such lines: http://www.clonezilla.org I've used Clonezilla for work projects which have mainly involved cloning linux systems, and last week put it to a kind of an ultimate test which it passed easily....

Do the cautions or negative judgments on such developments indicate a suspicious attitude toward modern biotechnology in general? On the contrary, the document says that in making use of these new technological powers the human being “participates in the creative power of God” and acts as “the steward of the value and intrinsic beauty of creation.” It is because this power carries with it great responsibility that we must never misuse technology to demean human dignity, but always to serve the value and dignity of every person without exception. Misuse of genetic technology may make possible new forms of discrimination...

Regarding the Instruction Dignitas PersonaeAim In recent years, biomedical research has made great strides, opening new possibilities for the treatment of disease, but also giving rise to serious questions which had not been directly treated in the Instruction Donum vitae (22 February 1987).  A new Instruction, which is dated 8 September 2008, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, seeks to provide some responses to these new bioethical questions, as these have been the focus of expectations and concerns in large sectors of society.  In this way, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith seeks both...

THE Vatican today said life was sacred at every stage of its existence and condemned artificial fertilisation, embryonic stem-cell research, human cloning and drugs which block pregnancy from taking hold. A long-awaited document on bioethics by the Vatican's doctrinal body also said the so-called "morning after pill" and the drug RU-486, which blocks the action of hormones needed to keep a fertilised egg implanted in the uterus, fall "within the sin of abortion" and are gravely immoral. "Dignitas Personae" (dignity of a person), an Instruction of Certain Bioethical Questions," is an attempt to bring the Church up to date with...

Scientists working in secret got serious about cloning in the early 1960's. Abortions began to be performed wholesale at this time to provide fetal tissue for their cloning work. The young generation of Americans are asking, When will cloning of people take place. The answer is that it already has long ago. An article written by Andrew Kimbrell that was placed in many leading daily papers across the U.S. is quite revealing. He comes right up to almost telling people what has been going on.

In July of 1993, I found myself standing outside at nigth near the entrance to an underground base that was situated inside a mountain. I saw official-looking people and some military personell. A Blonde being with dark brown eyes said to me: "Your Government is performing human cloning experiments. Men and women are being cloned and experimented on. When the experiments are over the clones are used for prostitution by the scientists, the government people, and the military personnel.

So, with the stroke of a pen human embryos would become property, capable of being “manufactured” like a commodity, and available to be used as spare parts in experimentation which has produced no discernible scientific results. It is all even more troubling because adult stem cell research and fetal chord blood research have actually shown significant promise but have received little or no attention or research support. Most importantly, the use of these stem cells is never deadly. Every so called “extraction” of embryonic stem cells kills a living human embryo. I write as a Catholic Christian who warned of...

Jurassic Park? Still not close to being real. But cloned woolly mammoths just became more possible, thanks to Japanese researchers who announced Monday that they'd cloned dead mice that had been frozen for 16 years. When animal tissue freezes, cell walls burst and the DNA inside the cell nuclei can be seriously damaged. Because of that, most scientists had assumed it'd be impossible to get any good DNA from the thousands of frozen mammoths thought to still lie in Siberian permafrost. The Japanese team figured, however, that the high concentration of sugar in brain tissue might preserve DNA. So they...

October 14, 2008, 6:20 a.m. Phrase Not FoundDebate omissions. By John J. Pitney Jr. Tomorrow night, John McCain and Barack Obama debate for the last time. After two presidential debates and one vice presidential debate, what is left for moderator Bob Schieffer to ask?  Plenty. Transcripts of the previous debates are online. Thanks to the “Find� function of web browsers, it is simple to search for words and phrases appearing in questions and answers.  (Technical hint: Firefox is better on this score than Explorer.) It’s also easy to find out which terms have not yet come up at all....

"Obama said oops on 6 state Senate votes by Peter Wallsten" reports, During his eight years in state office, Obama cast more than 4,000 votes. Of those, according to transcripts of the proceedings in Springfield, he hit the wrong button at least six times. ...Obama was the lone dissenter on Feb. 24, 2000, against 57 yeas for a ban on human cloning. "I pressed the wrong button by accident," he said. Now imagine this buffoon in the Oval Office: OOPS! I PRESSED THE WRONG BUTTON!

- Food and milk from the offspring of cloned animals may already have entered the U.S. food supply, the Food and Drug Administration said on Tuesday, but it would be impossible to know because there is no difference between cloned and conventional products. The FDA said in January meat and milk from cloned cattle, swine and goats and their offspring were as safe to eat as products obtained from traditional animals. Before then, farmers and ranchers had followed a voluntary moratorium that prevented the sale of clones and their offspring. "It is theoretically possible" offspring from clones are in the...

A former beauty queen whose obsession with an LDS Church missionary made international tabloid headlines 30 years ago appears to be the same woman who had her dog cloned in South Korea this week. In 1977, Joyce McKinney, a one-time Brigham Young University drama student and Miss Wyoming-World, was accused of kidnapping and raping a missionary in England. It came to be known worldwide as the "Mormon sex-slave case." This week news media reported that a woman named Bernann McKinney sold her house to pay a South Korean company $50,000 to clone a litter of puppies using frozen DNA from...

Memories of an alleged kidnapping in 1978 that became universally known as the 'Mormon sex-slave case' were stirred following the appearance of Bernann McKinney on television screens and in newspapers around the world with the five pit bull puppies that were cloned from her much-loved dog Booger's frozen DNA. Reports from Seoul, explaining that Ms McKinney had paid £25,000 for the procedure to create five genetically identical replicas of her pet in the first transaction of its kind led to furious speculation about her true identity. To those who remembered the sex slave scandal, Ms McKinney's face looked familiar. The...

US doctors have for the first time successfully treated a skin cancer patient with cells cloned from his own immune system, a study released Wednesday showed. The ground-breaking treatment for advanced melanoma, or skin cancer, led to a long remission for the patient and used his own cloned infection-fighting T-cells, said doctor Cassian Yee, the lead author of the study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Yee and his associates from the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle removed CD4+ T-cells, a type of white blood cell, from a 52-year-old man whose melanoma had...

AUSTRALIA'S first licences to clone human embryos could be granted as early as this week. A National Health and Medical Research Council panel met in Canberra on Friday to consider applications from two separate research groups. The green light for the controversial science could lead to a cure for such afflictions as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases and type 1 diabetes in less than 10 years. A Monash University team and another based at the Melbourne lab of the Australian Stem Cell Centre have each partnered with Sydney IVF to submit licence requests. The teams want permission to create cloned...

The news out of England is discouraging. Single women and lesbian partners will soon stand in the legal same place as fathers with the deletion of four words from British legislation called “The Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill”. The Bill had language in it which had been applied at fertility clinics to encourage two- parent, opposite sex families. Putting aside all of the vitally important moral issues of anyone ever even using a “fertility” clinic, and the horrid truth of the killing of the “spare” “embryos” which are “manufactured” in the IVF process, I write this commentary to address just...

London, May 20, 2008 / 05:26 pm (CNA).- Despite criticism that the research techniques involved are unethical and overhyped, British lawmakers on Monday defeated a proposal to ban the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos for medical research. The House of Commons is considering amendments to the Human Embryology and Fertilization Bill, which will affect regulations of embryonic research and artificial reproduction. The proposed amendment to outlaw the creation of hybrid embryos was defeated by 336 to 176 votes, according to Agence France Presse. Human-animal hybrid embryos are created by inserting the nucleus of a human cell into an animal egg....

In what could signal a further shift in the global stem cell debate, lawmakers in an Australia state have rejected legislation allow the cloning of human embryos for research purposes. This week's vote in the Western Australia capital, Perth, is believed to be one of the first times the embryonic cloning issue has been considered by a legislature anywhere in the world since reports of a major research breakthrough last November prompted new questions about the need to use embryos at all. The issue will be under discussion on Capitol Hill again on Thursday, when a health subcommittee of the...

Jefferson City, MO (LifeNews.com) -- A measure that responds to the 2006 Amendment 2 proposal Missouri voters narrowly approved will not make the ballot this November. The measure would prohibit somatic cell nuclear transfer, a type of human cloning practice used by scientists to create and kill human beings for research purposes. It is designed to close a pro-cloning loophole in Amendment 2 that opponents hard warned would lead to human cloning. On Friday, the Missouri Court of Appeals ruled that part of Secretary of State Robin Carnahan’s ballot summary was “insufficient and unfair.” Carnahan released the ballot summary in...

Researchers at Memorial-Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) have announced a very promising development in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. They’ve used a process called somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) in laboratory mice, which led to neurological improvement deemed successful in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. The research team expressed hope for further studies that might lead to similar cures in humans and in other diseases that affect other organ systems. SCNT works in mice with Parkinson’s diseaseSCNT, also known as therapeutic cloning, involves a process of manipulating the nucleus of a cell and transplanting it back into the subject, thereby bypassing the...

SIOUX CITY -- It's a safe bet the passengers flying out of Sioux Gateway Airport this weekend didn't realize they were in the presence of what scientists hope will be the world's first commercially cloned dog. That's probably because the future canine -- set to be cloned from a pit bull named Booger -- was only four vials of skin cells carefully packaged inside an innocuous looking beige canister. The canister should be in Korea by now, but the journey started Friday in Siouxland when Jin Han Hong, Ph.D., of RNL Biostar Inc., picked up the vials from storage at...

A Minnesota House panel approved a measure on Thursday that concerns pro-life advocates because it would approve and fund human cloning and the killing of human embryos at the University of Minnesota. The panel voted 11-8 for the Kahn–Cohen Cloning Bill that would force taxpayers to fund destructive research. A leading pro-life group told LifeNews.com that the bill promotes the destruction of human life on a scale never before seen in Minnesota, and also requires university scientists to kill all cloned human beings or face felony charges. “This is the most shocking and dangerous threat to human life in years,”...

How UK scientists could make men redundant in creating babies by turning WOMEN'S bone marrow into spermBy FIONA MACRAE - More by this author » Last updated at 00:52am on 31st January 2008 CommentsBye bye baby: The new science means the biological role of the father is under threat British scientists are ready to turn female bone marrow into sperm, cutting men out of the process of creating life.  The breakthrough paves the way for lesbian couples to have children that are biologically their own.  Gay men could follow suit by using the technique to make eggs from male...

FDA confirms milk, meat from clones safe to eat Moratorium on clones in food supply to continue as market adjusts By Heidi Clausen Regional Editor The Food and Drug Administration on Jan. 15 issued its final risk assessment on clones, confirming its earlier findings that milk and meat from cloned livestock is safe for human consumption. Several years of studies have concluded that food from clones does not differ from from food from conventionally bred animals. However, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's moratorium on milk and meat from cloned animals in the food supply will continue for an unspecified period...

(WASHINGTON) - Some U.S. meat and dairy producers are finding new reasons to be nervous about their export prospects after federal regulators gave backing this week to food from cloned animals. The final ruling on Tuesday from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which found that food from cloned animals and their offspring poses no special health risks, capped years of debate over the technology. Proponents say animal cloning, replicating prized livestock that can breed highly productive offspring, is a windfall for consumers. But critics say greater testing is needed and want closer examination of the technology's ethical implications. Even...