Harvard Team Seeks to Clone Embryos

The Washington Post is reporting this morning - mistakenly as best one can determine - that Harvard is attempting to create the first cloned human embryos for medical research in the U.S. The piece mentions that UCSF tried and failed to harvest stem cells from embryos. But as early as 1996 a team at the University of Massachusetts was working on identifying cells for harvesting from cow-human embryos, whose nucleii were human, embryos which were created using somatic cell nuclear transfer. Previous reports of cloned human embryos from both China and Korea have also resulted, albeit much later and in one case in Chinese, in publications ... Weiss reports that another such attempt at ACT failed, but that misses the point: Harvard hasn't done it either, so the only news here is that someone ELSE is trying. The question of whether it can migrate into "the private sector" has already been answered! Rick Weiss reports that the group at Harvard is waiting on approval from Harvard's ethics "boards" by which he means IRBs, but as Rick knows very well the IRB doesn't review "ethics" in the sense in which he is describing "ethics boards." It's an important piece spun to be more important - and it illustrates the problem with creating accurate reporting about the most complex political issue to hit science in a long time.