How can cloning help medically

Embryonic stem cell test go-ahead. Human 'cloning' makes stem cells. Dolly the sheep clone dies young. UK scientists clone human embryo. Human cloning 'flawed'. Image source, SPL. Dolly's birth in was seen as a major scientific breakthrough. The ethical rival. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.

View comments. Published 22 September Published 25 November Remember Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be born through a cloning technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer SCNT? SCNT is also a technique for generating embryonic stem cells for research purposes. While researchers have accomplished SCNT in many animal species, it could work better than it does now.

It took the scientists who cloned Dolly tries before they got it right. To this day, SCNT efficiency—that is, the percent of nuclear transfers it takes generate a living animal—still hovers around 1 to 2 percent in mice, 5 to 20 percent in cows and 1 to 5 percent in other species. By comparison, the success rate in mice of in vitro fertilization IVF is around 50 percent.

Skip to main content. The Value of Therapeutic Cloning for Patients. Share Print. There is some confusion surrounding use of the word "cloning. However, it is important to distinguish between that and other appropriate and important uses of the technology such as cloning specific human cells, genes and other tissues that do not and cannot lead to a human being therapeutic cloning.

These techniques are integral to the production of breakthrough medicines, diagnostics and vaccines to treat many diseases. They could also produce replacement skin, cartilage and bone tissue for burn and accident victims, and result in ways to regenerate retinal and spinal cord tissue.

The nation's top scientists from The National Academies of Science and National Institutes of Health, as well as numerous Nobel Laureates attest to the scientific value of this research. A February, report from the National Academies of Science concluded that while reproductive cloning is unsafe and should be banned, therapeutic cloning has sufficient scientific potential that it should be allowed to continue. Stem cell research will help scientists learn how to develop cells and tissue to cure disease.

Over many years, scientists have demonstrated that they may learn how to induce these cells to differentiate into many different cell types. Accomplishing that would enable scientists to create new, healthy cells and tissue for transplantation to replace damaged or dead tissue.

In animals, only a handful of cloned embryos survive to birth, and many have health problems later. Experts say moral opposition to cloning as a means of reproduction, has clouded opinion on the technique's potential usefulness in regenerative medicine. Yet, many people "fear that slippery slope Investment in therapeutic cloning research has dwindled, and few countries—among them Belgium, China, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Britain, Singapore—allow the creation of embryos for experimentation.

In therapeutic cloning, scientists harvest stem cells from a very early-stage embryo—called a blastocyst—a hollow ball of about cells.

Coaxing these "blank", juvenile cells into specialised liver or blood cells, for example, holds the promise of curing disease or repairing damaged organs. And while a handful of scientists have succeeded in creating stem cells through SCNT, none have been grown into a functional human organ.

Cloning may not have found a direct application in medicine, but it has yielded many spinoff technologies, experts say. Induced pluripotent IP stem cells are created by stimulating mature, already specialised, cells back into a juvenile state—basically cloning without the need for an embryo. The Nobel-capped discovery is the new focus in regenerative medicine focused, though the jury is out as to whether IP stem cells work as well as embryonic ones.

Another spinoff is mitochondrial gene transfer, a new way of planting parental DNA into a healthy egg to create an embryo free of harmful mutations carried by the mother. Aaron Levine, a bioethicist at Georgia Tech, said cloning's biggest impact on human health is likely to come from animals raised to produce organs, tissue or biological drugs that will not be rejected by the human immune system. Use this form if you have come across a typo, inaccuracy or would like to send an edit request for the content on this page.

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