A team of American researchers announced today that it had, for the first time, generated embryonic clones from a monkey and then used those to produce colonies of embryonic stem cells. The technique, which they described in a paper released by Nature, may eventually help scientists develop human embryonic stem cells using cloned embryos.
The researchers, led by Shoukhrat M. Mitalipov of the Oregon Health & Science University, say their work could point toward a method for developing tissues to treat diseases and, more immediately, to study how important diseases develop. Researchers have tried for years without success to create embryonic clones from primates.
The South Korean researcher Woo Suk Hwang falsely claimed success in cloning human cells in 2004. This week, Nature took the unusual step of having an independent team experimentally validate Mr. Mitalipov’s work. —Richard Monastersky
