Clonaid, the company run by a Canada-based religious cult called the Raelian Movement, will this week begin its attempts to clone a human being. According to a report in the Sunday Times newspaper, the project to clone a 10-month-old baby will be carried out in a secret laboratory somewhere in the US state of Nevada.
The experiments are being funded by the parents of the baby girl, who died in February. The Clonaid scientists hope to remove the nuclei from cells taken from the infant, and fuse them with donor eggs stripped of their own genetic material. Any resulting embryos will then be transferred to the womb of a surrogate mother. This technique, used to clone Dolly the sheep, is known as somatic cell nuclear transfer SCNT.
Although the method has a low success rate, some experts think that around 20 egg donors and 50 surrogate mothers would be enough to produce a human baby. Clonaid has over 50 volunteer surrogate mothers, including the eldest daughter of scientific director Brigitte Boisselier. But cloning expert Tony Perry, of the Rockefeller University in New York, said it was 'morally repugnant' to try and clone humans when animal experiments were producing clones with high levels of defects.
Meanwhile, scientists at the Roslin Institute announced last week that the famous sheep, born four years ago, is to retire. Dolly will no longer be mated or put on show, and no more experiments will be carried out on her. Ian Wilmut, leader of the team that created Dolly, has also condemned the human cloning project as 'absolutely criminal'.
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