Stemagen is a corporation headed by Dr. Samuel Wood, notable for cloning adult skin cells On January, 2008, Dr. Andrew French, Stemagen's chief scientific officer and Wood in

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

, announced that they successfully created the first 5 mature human embryos using DNA from adult skin cells, aiming to provide a less-controversial source of viable embryonic

stem cells In multicellular organisms, stem cells are undifferentiated or partially differentiated cells that can differentiate into various types of cells and proliferate indefinitely to produce more of the same stem cell. They are the earliest type o ...

.Somers, Terr
''Biotech Stemagen fused skin and egg to clone embryo''

The San Diego Union-Tribune ''The San Diego Union-Tribune'' is a metropolitan daily newspaper published in San Diego, California, that has run since 1868. Its name derives from a 1992 merger between the two major daily newspapers at the time, ''The San Diego Union'' and ...

, January 18, 2008 Dr. Wood and a colleague donated skin cells, and DNA from those cells was transferred to human eggs. It is not clear if the embryos produced would have been capable of further development, but Dr. Wood stated that if that were possible, using the technology for reproductive cloning would be both unethical and illegal. The 5 cloned embryos, created in Stemagen Corporation lab, in

La Jolla La Jolla ( , ) is a hilly, seaside neighborhood within the city of San Diego, California, United States, occupying of curving coastline along the Pacific Ocean. The population reported in the 2010 census was 46,781. La Jolla is surrounded on ...

, were later destroyed to confirm the nuclear transfer process. Dr. French, lead author, and five other researchers published their findings in the online research journal ''Stem Cells'', in an article entitled ''Development of human cloned blastocysts following somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) with adult fibroblasts.''French, Andrew J., Cathrine A. Adams et al
''Development of human cloned blastocysts following somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) with adult fibroblasts''
''Stem Cells'' published by AlphaMed Press 2008 Feb;26(2):485-93. Epub 2008 January 17, 2008.

References

Biotechnology companies of the United States {{biotech-stub

See also

References