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Human cloning

Creation of a genetically identical copy of a human

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Two commonly discussed types of human cloning are therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning.

Therapeutic cloning would involve cloning cells from a human for use in medicine and transplants. It is an active area of research, and is in medical practice over the world. Two common methods of therapeutic cloning that are being researched are somatic-cell nuclear transfer and (more recently) pluripotent stem cell induction.

Reproductive cloning would involve making an entire cloned human, instead of just specific cells or tissues.

History

Although the possibility of cloning humans had been the subject of speculation for much of the 20th century, scientists and policymakers began to take the prospect seriously in 1969. J. B. S. Haldane was the first to introduce the idea of human cloning, for which he used the terms "clone" and "cloning", which had been used in agriculture since the early 20th century. In his speech on "Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten Thousand Years" at the Ciba Foundation Symposium on Man and his Future in 1963, he said:

It is extremely hopeful that some human cell lines can be grown on a medium of precisely known chemical composition. Perhaps the first step will be the production of a clone from a single fertilized egg, as in Brave New World... Assuming that cloning is possible, I expect that most clones would be made from people aged at least fifty, except for athletes and dancers, who would be cloned younger. They would be made from people who were held to have excelled in a socially acceptable accomplishment...

Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Joshua Lederberg advocated cloning and genetic engineering in an article in The American Naturalist in 1966 and again, the following year, in The Washington Post. He sparked a debate with conservative bioethicist Leon Kass, who wrote at the time that "the programmed reproduction of man will, in fact, dehumanize him." Another Nobel Laureate, James D. Watson, publicized the potential and the perils of cloning in his Atlantic Monthly essay, "Moving Toward the Clonal Man", in 1971.

With the cloning of a sheep known as Dolly in 1996 by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), the idea of human cloning became a hot debate topic. Many nations outlawed it, while a few scientists promised to make a clone within the next few years. The first hybrid human clone was created in November 1998, by Advanced Cell Technology. It was created using SCNT; a nucleus was taken from a man's leg cell and inserted into a cow's egg from which the nucleus had been removed, and the hybrid cell was cultured and developed into an embryo. The embryo was destroyed after 12 days.

In 2004 and 2005, Hwang Woo-suk, a professor at Seoul National University, published two separate articles in the journal Science claiming to have successfully harvested pluripotent, embryonic stem cells from a cloned human blastocyst using SCNT techniques. Hwang claimed to have created eleven different patient-specific stem cell lines. This would have been the first major breakthrough in human cloning. However, in 2006 Science retracted both of his articles on account of clear evidence that much of his data from the experiments was fabricated.

In January 2008, Dr. Andrew French and Samuel Wood of the biotechnology company Stemagen announced that they successfully created the first five mature human embryos using SCNT. In this case, each embryo was created by taking a nucleus from a skin cell (donated by Wood and a colleague) and inserting it into a human egg from which the nucleus had been removed. The embryos were developed only to the blastocyst stage, at which point they were studied in processes that destroyed them. Members of the lab said that their next set of experiments would aim to generate embryonic stem cell lines; these are the "holy grail" that would be useful for therapeutic or reproductive cloning.

In 2011, scientists at the New York Stem Cell Foundation announced that they had succeeded in generating embryonic stem cell lines, but their process involved leaving the oocyte's nucleus in place, resulting in triploid cells, which would not be useful for cloning.

In 2013, a group of scientists led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov published the first report of embryonic stem cells created using SCNT. In this experiment, the researchers developed a protocol for using SCNT in human cells, which differs slightly from the one used in other organisms. Four embryonic stem cell lines from human fetal somatic cells were derived from those blastocysts. All four lines were derived using oocytes from the same donor, ensuring that all mitochondrial DNA inherited was identical. A year later, a team led by Robert Lanza at Advanced Cell Technology reported that they had replicated Mitalipov's results and further demonstrated the effectiveness by cloning adult cells using SCNT.

In 2018, the first successful cloning of primates using SCNT was reported with the birth of two live female clones, crab-eating macaques named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, and there have been several similar reports since. However, all these cases involved cloning of fetal cells - as yet, no primate has been cloned from adult cells.

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