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FDA says cloned
meat, milk safe
    WASHINGTON — Just over a decade after scientists cloned the first animal, the last major barrier to selling meat and milk from clones has fallen: The U.S. government declared this food safe Tuesday.
    Now, will people buy it?
    Consumer anxiety about cloning is serious enough that several major food companies, including the big dairy producer Dean Foods Co. and Smithfield Foods, say they aren’t planning to sell products from cloned animals.
    And the industry says most Americans would never eat a cloned animal for sheer economic reasons: At $10,000 to $20,000 per cloned cow — compared with $1,000 for an ordinary steer — they’re too valuable. They would be used primarily for breeding, to produce a steady supply of cattle that are particularly tender, for instance, or for prize dairy cows. It would be offspring of clones that consumers would eat.
    But it will be hard to tell which foods do contain ingredients originating from cloned animals. The Food and Drug Administration ruled that labels won’t have to reveal whether the food comes from cloned cows, pigs or goats, or the clones’ offspring, because those ingredients are no different than meat or milk from livestock bred the old-fashioned way.

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The Food and Drug Administration ruled that labels won’t have to reveal whether the food comes from cloned cows, pigs or goats, or the clones’ offspring, because those ingredients are no different than meat or milk from livestock bred the old-fashioned way.

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Scientists Make Human Embryo Clones
Thursday, January 17, 2008

Scientists in California say they have produced embryos that are clones of two men, a potential step toward developing scientifically valuable stem cells.

The new report documents embryos made with ordinary skin cells. But it's not the first time human cloned embryos have been made. In 2005, for example, scientists in Britain reported using embryonic stem cells to produce a cloned embryo. It matured enough to produce stem cells, but none were extracted.

Stem cells weren't produced by the new embryos either, and because of that, experts reacted coolly to the research.

"I found it difficult to determine what was substantially new," said Doug Melton of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He said the "next big advance will be to create a human embryonic stem cell line" from cloned embryos. "This has yet to be achieved."

Dr. George Daley of the Harvard institute and Children's Hospital Boston called the new report interesting but agreed that "the real splash" will be when somebody creates stem cell lines from cloned human embryos.

"It's only a matter of time before some group succeeds," Daley said.

Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk claimed a few years ago that he'd created such cell lines, but that turned out to be a fraud.

Dr. Samuel Wood, a co-author of the new paper and chief executive of Stemagen Corp. of La Jolla, Calif., said he and his colleagues are now attempting to produce stem cell lines from the embryos.

The work was published online Thursday by the journal Stem Cells.

Scientists say stem cells from cloned embryos could provide a valuable tool for studying diseases, screening drugs and, perhaps someday, creating transplant material to treat conditions like diabetes and Parkinson's disease.

But critics raise objections. The process "involves creating human lives in the laboratory solely to destroy them for alleged benefit to others," said Richard Doerflinger, spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Citing the earlier work in Britain, he also said that as a scientific advancement, the new work was "very limited."

Other objections to cloning include concerns about health risks and exploitation if large numbers of women are asked to provide eggs.

Those objections are one reason that an alternative route to stem cells made headlines last November. Scientists reported a relatively simple way to turn skin cells directly into stem cells. This direct reprogramming carries a theoretical risk of cancer for the recipients of tissue from these cells, however, and many scientists have urged that work continue on the cloning technique as well.

The cloning approach involves inserting DNA from a person into an egg, and then growing the egg into an embryo about five days old before extracting the stem cells. At that stage, the embryo is a sphere of about 150 cells.

In the new work, researchers took skin cells from Wood and another volunteer and produced three embryos with DNA matching the men's. Further DNA testing on one of these embryos strengthened the case that it was a clone, researchers said.

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Stem cell breakthrough isn’t end of the matter

    Re the Jan. 8 letter by Raymond S. Kukfa, “Stem-cell breakthrough makes politics moot,” I hope Mr. Kukfa is correct that the recent breakthrough in stem cell research (using altered skin cells) obviates the need to kill human embryos. This would certainly end the ethical and political controversy surrounding stem cells and is a suggestion I made in a letter printed July 1, 2007.
    A visit to the Internet, however, reveals that a strong contingent of leaders in the field still intend to pursue human embryonic stem cell research that kills embryos, despite this breakthrough that spares embryos. They claim they have legitimate reasons for continuing their efforts with embryos and actually plan on conducting both types of research.
    One of their arguments is that stem cells from embryos may be more appropriate for a given situation or treatment than altered cells from skin (and vice versa). In this sense, further study of embryonic cells is warranted because of the breakthrough! There is now a need to compare two alternatives to see which is most effective and when each is most effective.
    Problems with the new, breakthrough cells already is that they cause tumor-related deaths in mice and require more complex programming than embryonic cells.
    Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of research that kills human embryos, nor an end to the moral and political dilemmas this activity engenders — such as the debate whether to federally finance this research.
    HAL D. ZENDLE

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Hope that stem cell research can cure diseases
First published: Sunday, February 10, 2008

After reading the article "Stemming effects of crippling ills" on Jan. 29, I wanted to congratulate you on a spectacular story. I did not know that we had a Neural Stem Cell Institute right here in the Capital Region.
It's so great to know that we could have people from this area who could find a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's disease. I also think it's fantastic that the institute joined dozens of other researchers and universities.
     
Stem cell research hits close to home for me because a close family friend has a daughter who has been blind from birth. They believe that stem cell research may be able to cure her blindness. I hope more people support the research and help them find cures for many diseases.
NICOLE ROSS Watervliet

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Breeders aiming to clone top bullfighting studs
BY DANIEL WOOLLS The Associated Press

    GUADALIX DE LA SIERRA, Spain — Alcalde, a hulking black bull, is quite the stud. He sires up to 40 calves a year, most of them top-grade fighters, even though in human terms he would be almost 80 years old and is nearing the end of his life.
    Victoriano del Rio, a fifth-generation breeder of fighting bulls, cringes at the thought of losing an animal with such good genes. So he is going to clone him — an unprecedented marriage of modern technology and the Spanish-speaking world’s ancient, beloved pastime.
    “I am extremely fond of this bull,” del Rio said at his ranch in this town outside Madrid, watching 16-year-old Alcalde graze with some of his latest offspring. “ He
has given us tremendous satisfaction.”
    While a bull in its prime can
sire as many as 80 calves a year,
Alcalde’s record is “exceptional”
for an animal of his advanced age, del Rio said.
    The Spaniard is not alone in the adventure. Rancher Jose Manuel Fernandez in Mexico plans to replicate Zalamero, another aging bull that achieved the rare feat of dodging death in the ring: In 1994, Zalamero put up such a relentless fight one autumn day that judges spared his life. Since then he has been a priceless stud.
    While Alcalde never fought in the ring, he comes from a prestigious bloodline and has proved to be a producer of champions.
— will be born in November or December. Alcalde’s clone would be born in May or June of 2009.
    Both breeders have hired Via-Gen, a cloning company based in Austin, Texas, to do the job. The technique is essentially the same one used in 1996 to copy the sheep Dolly, the world’s first cloned mammal.
    It involves inserting the nucleus of a somatic cell from the bull — any cell that is not a sperm cell — into a cow egg cell that has been stripped of its nucleus. The egg undergoes electrical and chemical stimulation to make it divide and grow into an embryo. This is then implanted in a surrogate cow to be carried to term.
    ViaGen spokesman Ben Carlson confirmed the orders from del Rio and Fernandez, but would not comment on pregnancies or expected birth dates.
    Carlson said the breeders would pay standard cattle cloning prices: $17,500 for the first calf, $15,000 for
VISION OF FUTURE
    Fernandez is so bullish on cloning he envisions a future in which an afternoon at the arena — usually three matadors taking on two bulls each — might involve six genetically identical twins created from the same beast.
    “What I am looking for is a path toward innovation in bullfighting,” Fernandez said from Mexico City. “We are trying to give the show greater quality.”
    If all goes as planned, Zalamero II — or several of them, because Fernandez is trying for four or fi ve the second, $12,500 for the third and $10,000 for the fourth and beyond.
    ViaGen has cloned about 300 mammals, including show pigs, rodeo horses and bucking broncos, since its founding in 2002. But this is the world’s first attempt at cloning the breed that takes on matadors in the deadly minuet of bullfighting, the breeders said.
    “It is a new field that is opening up before us,” said Eduardo Miura, breeder of a line of Spanish bulls so fierce the very word Miura has become part of the language: to act like a Miura is to become furious. He said breeders in Spain are generally supportive of del Rio’s cloning plans.
    But questions abound. It’s one thing to pass on a carbon copy of a fighting or stud bull’s DNA, quite another to expect the new animal to mimic its template.
    Only as much as 40 percent of an animal’s behavior is attributable to its genes, said Javier Canon, a geneticist at Madrid’s Complutense University who specializes in fi ghting bulls. External factors account for the rest.
    And even if the sons of a great fighting bull were always great fighting bulls themselves, there are much cheaper and more effective ways to harvest those valuable genes, such as using the father’s semen for artificial insemination.
    “If you ask me about this project from a technical point of view, in terms of genetic progress, it serves no purpose whatsoever,” Canon said.
    Even in its traditional mode, bull breeding is a slow, hit-or-miss business. Studs are crossed with cows carefully selected for feistiness through simulated fights in the ring, albeit without bloodshed. Then the rancher has to wait a few years for the resulting bull to grow up, and see if it has the right stuff.
    “Theoretically, two plus two are four. In this, when the time comes, it might not be four, but rather minus three. The results are very elastic,” Miura said from his ranch outside Seville. “Time will tell if Victoriano is right.”
CHANCE OF FAILURE
    “Indeed, it is an experiment,” del Rio said of his cloning project. “We are going to investigate. Investigation always carries with it the possibility that you are wrong.”
    A ViaGen team will come to Spain in a few weeks to collect skin samples from Alcalde — the name means mayor in Spanish — and take them back to Texas to start preparing embryos.
    Fernandez’s endeavor is at a more advanced stage; he said the embryos are already growing and will be implanted in cows this month in Mexico. Viagen is also in talks with other breeders in Spain.
    Fernandez says about 20 percent of Mexican breeders dismiss his project as unworkable, arguing the clones would not be on par with Zalamero. At age 18 — ancient for a bull — yet another calf of his was born recently.
    Fernandez says wait and see.
    “I imagine I am building a bridge, and they tell me, ‘Hey, that bridge is not going to work.’ So I say let me finish, and if I cross the bridge, then it is OK. It held. If it doesn’t hold, then you were right.”
    “At least we are trying,” Fernandez said of himself and del Rio. “We are not waiting around to see someone else do it. We are trying.”

VICTOR R. CAIVANO/THE ASSOCIATED PRES The bull Alcalde grazes in a field next to the town of Guadalix de la Sierra, Spain. Alcalde will be cloned to preserve his good genes for breeding fighting bulls.

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US biotech company offers to clone man's best friend
Wed May 21, 10:58 AM ET


A US biotech company on Wednesday announced it will auction off the right for five dog owners to have their furry best friend cloned, with bidding starting at 100,000 dollars.

"BioArts International ... will sell five dog cloning service slots to the general public via a worldwide online auction," the California-based biotech start-up said in a statement.

Registration for the auctions opens Wednesday. Bidding in that first auction begins on June 18 at 1300 GMT and runs for 24 hours, BioArts says on its bestfriendsagain.com website.

BioArts is the only company in the world licensed to clone dogs, cats and endangered species, the company statement says.

It uses the same cloning method that gave the world Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned in July 1996 from an adult cell.

Dogs are arguably the most difficult mammal to clone, according to BioArts.

"We may or may not perform any additional commercial dog cloning services after this auction," the company says on its website.

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FDA OKs First Embryonic Stem Cell Research Trial on Humans, Despite Concerns
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
July 30, 2010

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- The Obama administration has approved the bid by cloning company Geron to undertake the first trial involving the use of embryonic stem cells in humans. They have never been used before in people because the cells cause tumors and have been plagued by immune system rejection issues when tried in animals.

Scientists and pro-life advocates say human embryonic stem cells are not ready for trial because problems associated with the cells in animals haven't been solved.

The Food and Drug Administration had initially placed the trial on hold but Geron indicated today that the agency is now allowing it to proceed with an early stage trial on a stem cell therapy for acute spinal cord injury.

The FDA placed a hold on the trial last August, when evidence showed Geron's GRNOPC1 encountered safety issues when used in animal studies. Geron's own data showed higher frequency of small cysts within the injury site in the spinal cord of animals injected with the embryonic cells.

“We are pleased with the FDA’s decision to allow our planned clinical trial of GRNOPC1 in spinal cord injury to proceed,” said Thomas B. Okarma, Geron's president, in a public statement today. The company's stock rose in value following the announcement.

Previously, Dr. John A. Kessler, chairman of neurology and director of the stem cell institute at Northwestern University, said the first application from Geron for the embryonic stem cell trial was flawed.

“We really want the best trial to be done for this first trial, and this might not be it,’’ he said at the time....................>>>>......................>>>>................http://lifenews.com/bio3137.html

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NEW YORK – A few months ago, Dr. Thomas Einhorn was treating a patient with a broken ankle that wouldn't heal, even with multiple surgeries. So he sought help from the man's own body.

Einhorn drew bone marrow from the man's pelvic bone with a needle, condensed it to about four teaspoons of rich red liquid, and injected that into his ankle.

Four months later the ankle was healed. Einhorn, chairman of orthopedic surgery at Boston University Medical Center, credits "adult" stem cells in the marrow injection. He tried it because of published research from France.

Einhorn's experience isn't a rigorous study. But it's an example of many innovative therapies doctors are studying with adult stem cells. Those are stem cells typically taken from bone marrow and blood — not embryos.

For all the emotional debate that began about a decade ago on allowing the use of embryonic stem cells, it's adult stem cells that are in human testing today. An extensive review of stem cell projects and interviews with two dozen experts reveal a wide range of potential treatments.

Adult stem cells are being studied in people who suffer from multiple sclerosis, heart attacks and diabetes. Some early results suggest stem cells can help some patients avoid leg amputation. Recently, researchers reported that they restored vision to patients whose eyes were damaged by chemicals.

Apart from these efforts, transplants of adult stem cells have become a standard lifesaving therapy for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people with leukemia, lymphoma and other blood diseases.

"That's really one of the great success stories of stem cell biology that gives us all hope," says Dr. David Scadden of Harvard, who notes stem cells are also used to grow skin grafts.

"If we can recreate that success in other tissues, what can we possibly imagine for other people?"

That sort of promise has long been held out for embryonic stem cells, which were first isolated and grown in a lab dish in 1998. Controversy over their use surrounded the 2001 decision by former President George W. Bush to allow only restricted federal funding for studying them.

Proponents over the past decade have included former first lady Nancy Reagan and actors Michael J. Fox and the late Christopher Reeve. Opponents object that human embryos have to be destroyed to harvest the cells.