How close are we to cloning human organs?

[Very_Boring_Name]

anybody know?

[BonnieJW]

1. Duke University Med Center

is growing organs. I don't know if cloning is being done.

[dembotoz]

2. we already have--Republicans in washington--a whole lot of pricks

but perhaps they are not human.

[Lochloosa]

3. Therapeutic Cloning

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/cloning.shtml

Therapeutic Cloning

Therapeutic cloning, also called "embryo cloning," is the production of human embryos for use in research. The goal of this process is not to create cloned human beings, but rather to harvest stem cells that can be used to study human development and to treat disease. Stem cells are important to biomedical researchers because they can be used to generate virtually any type of specialized cell in the human body. Stem cells are extracted from the egg after it has divided for 5 days. The egg at this stage of development is called a blastocyst. The extraction process destroys the embryo, which raises a variety of ethical concerns. Many researchers hope that one day stem cells can be used to serve as replacement cells to treat heart disease, Alzheimer's, cancer, and other diseases. See more on the potential use of cloning in organ transplants.

In November 2001, scientists from Advanced Cell Technologies (ACT), a biotechnology company in Massachusetts, announced that they had cloned the first human embryos for the purpose of advancing therapeutic research. To do this, they collected eggs from women's ovaries and then removed the genetic material from these eggs with a needle less than 2/10,000th of an inch wide. A skin cell was inserted inside the enucleated egg to serve as a new nucleus. The egg began to divide after it was stimulated with a chemical called ionomycin. The results were limited in success. Although this process was carried out with eight eggs, only three began dividing, and only one was able to divide into six cells before stopping.

[Peace Monger]

4. cloning a human liver..

at wake forest university.. they are leading the tissue engineering field right now.. I can't find a link but I watched a show on this recently.. it was shocking and amazing..

[lunatica]

5. I've read more than one article about being able to stimulate stem cells to grow into specific

organs. That was the reason they wanted fetus stem cells, because they haven't differentiated into organs. But in the last few years they've found they don't need these cells as much as they thought they did.

I think they're doing it as we speak.