BMJ  2004;328:421 (21 February), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7437.421

News

Korean scientists clone 30 human embryos

Tim Radford

Seattle

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

South Korean scientists based at the Seoul National University stirred up a storm worldwide last week when they announced in the online edition of the journal Science that they had derived a line of pluripotent embryo stem cells from one of 30 cloned blastocysts created by somatic cell nuclear transfer. In other words, they had created the first human cloned embryos (www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1094515).

Until last week, the consensus among cloning scientists had been that humans—and other primates—might prove much more difficult to clone than mice or sheep.

The team was led by Woo Suk Hwang of the university's veterinary college and Shin Yong Moon, a gynaecologist. Both called for a worldwide ban on human cloning for reproductive purposes. "Our goal is not to clone humans but to understand the causes of disease. Our aspiration is to treat incurable diseases," Dr Hwang told the meeting of the American Association for . . . [Full text of this article]

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