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Wednesday, August 8, 2001



THE CLONING ISSUE



"It would be too dangerous, too risky.
To use cells, there is potential there
(for medical purposes) but we
cannot kill embryos."

Ryuzo Yanagimachi



UH's cloner tempers colleagues with reality

Ryuzo Yanagimachi tempers
supporters' exuberance


By Helen Altonn
haltonn@starbulletin.com

MOST SCIENTISTS discussing cloning at a national meeting agreed it isn't safe, said a University of Hawaii anatomy and reproductive professor who attended the conference.

Ryuzo Yanagimachi, who made history in 1998 when his team cloned five generations of female mice, was one of 28 international scientists invited by the National Academy of Sciences to discuss cloning technology and ethical issues yesterday.

It was a fact-finding meeting and no conclusions were reached, Yanagimachi said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

University Yanagimachi, director of the Institute for Biogenesis Research in the John A. Burns School of Medicine, said scientists expressed opinions and recommendations and the academy chairman will issue a report late next month.

About 100 nonspecialists also were invited, Yanagimachi said.

The meeting comes amid national media reports of three scientists determined to perform human cloning research despite warnings of medical risk or ethical objections.

Panayiotis Michael Zavos, director of the Andrology Institute in Lexington, Ky., and Severino Antinori of the University of Rome, said they are pursuing cloning research to allow infertile men to have children.

Brigitte Boisselier, director of Clonaid, a human cloning company, said, "It is a fundamental right to reproduce in any way you want."

Except for those three, "Everyone is against human cloning," Yanagimachi said. "It would be too dangerous, too risky. To use cells, there is potential there (for medical purposes) but we cannot kill embryos."

Yanagimachi and Dr. Hidenori Akutsu, a "Team Yana" member, warned in a recent Star-Bulletin interview that cloning humans and animals with embryonic stem cells isn't safe.

In their research with mice, they found that even if a cloned animal looks normal, hidden problems may show up later.

Alan Colman, PPL Therapeutics director whose Scottish lab cloned the sheep Dolly in 1997, joined in the warnings, Yanagimachi said.

Colman said animal experiments prove cloning isn't safe and attempts to clone humans would result in miscarriages, deaths and abnormal births. Some proponents of cloning, Yanagimachi said, argued that human in vitro fertilization once was seen as a very difficult procedure that people were skeptical about, but now it's accepted.

The supporters said people are skeptical now about cloning, but with time, when technology improves, cloning will become safe like in vitro fertilization, he said.

"But this was a minority opinion," Yanagimachi said, adding that cloning and in vitro fertilization are not comparable. Chances of a cloned human embryo being aborted are very high, judging from animal experiments, he said. "Also, many die after birth, so we cannot take such a risk."

His team found in work with mice that the clones aren't exact copies of the original mice but have abnormal symptoms at birth. Some died of hematological or immunological problems before adulthood.

Yanagimachi said he is interested in using embryonic stem cells to replace dysfunctional cells and tissue causing various diseases and disorders. But he and Akutsu found in cloning cells with mice that changes can occur to cause abnormalities.

Use of an embryo to get stem cells to treat degenerative illnesses also is hotly debated, Yanagimachi pointed out.

"We don't know when life starts, but many people think life begins in an embryo," he said. "So this is a problem."

Instead of making an embryo, he suggested, "Maybe we need to look for some method to convert our body cells into an embryo-like cell.

"This may be the way to go but it is a long way to go. In an animal, we can do it, but in a human it is different."



Ka Leo O Hawaii
University of Hawaii



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