Company Has Long Aimed To Make Human Clones

By Maggie Fox

Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Advanced Cell Technology, the Massachusetts-based company that claimed on Sunday to have cloned a human embryo, has long aimed to clone people -- but not with the goal of making multiple copies of a human being.

Rather, its stated aim is to take a piece of skin and grow a new heart for a heart patient, or some brain tissue for an Alzheimer's patient, or vital pancreatic cells for a diabetes patient.

``We believe that reproductive cloning has potential risks to both mother and fetus that make it unwarranted at this time,'' ACT scientists write in an article to be published in Scientific American magazine next January.

``And we support a restriction on cloning for reproductive purposes until the safety and ethical issues surrounding it are resolved.''

The private company, based in Worcester, Massachusetts, has long been at the forefront of such technology.

``Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. is involved in the research and development of the technologies of Nuclear Transfer for human therapeutics and animal cloning,'' the company says at the top of its Internet Web site, at http:/www.advancedcell.com/.

On Sunday, ACT announced it had cloned a human embryo using a human skin cell and an egg from an unrelated woman. It also said it had caused an unfertilized human egg to grow and divide into an early embryo without fertilizing it, in a process known as parthenogenesis.

Cloned Cattle Were Normal

Just last week, ACT said its scientists had cloned 24 cows that were normal in every test. They said their success showed that cloned animals are not, as had been believed, usually doomed to be deformed or to die young.

The scientists, who reported those findings in the journal Science, will describe their results next week at a meeting at the National Academy of Sciences news web sites.

``(Other scientists) want to say, well, wait a minute, we have these problems with animal cloning,'' Michael West, chief executive officer of ACT, told NBC on Sunday. ``We do, indeed, have problems. But the majority of animals that are born, at least, are very normal, and we wanted to get the facts right on that point.

Another company, DeForest, Wisconsin-based Infigen, said it will report on similar results.

In 1998, Advanced Cell Technology said its scientists had fused human cells into cow eggs and let them grow as an embryo for a few days.

This was technically a clone, made using the same technology, called somatic cell nuclear transfer, used to make Dolly the sheep in 1997. Dolly was the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, and has seemed normal, even giving birth to her own lambs, conceived the old-fashioned way.

ACT also used cloning technology last November to create an endangered Asian gaur, a relative of the ox. The surrogate mother was a cow.

Sheep, Mice, Goats, Pigs And Cows

In August, three researchers considered mavericks by the mainstream scientific community told a meeting at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington that they planned to clone people to help infertile couples.

But experts at private companies and at academic centers expressed strong doubts about the abilities of any of the three to actually clone a person and noted that none had taken the standard route of publishing their research findings in journals reviewed by other scientists.

Many animals have been cloned -- sheep, mice, goats, pigs and cows. Most companies working on cloning animals want to create herds that can produce human proteins for use as medicine -- such as Dolly cloners PPL Therapeutics and the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Their work, now owned by U.S.-based Geron, created animals that produce the human protein AAT, used to treat cystic fibrosis patients, for instance. Roslin scientists also want to created cloned pigs that could be used as a source of organ transplants for human patients.

Also last year, Stem Cell Sciences and Charlestown, Massachusetts-based BioTransplant Inc. said they had created a human-pig hybrid using cloning technology, with a similar aim.

In 1997, ACT and Genzyme Transgenics Corporation announced a collaboration to genetically engineer cattle to produce human proteins in their milk, and then clone the cattle to create genetically perfect herds.

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This article posted December 22, 2001.