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Article: Seeking a road beyond cloning.(human embryos)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- U.S. News & World Report
- Article date:
- December 3, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 All rights reserved. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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As if creating a human embryo by cloning weren't mind-boggling enough, Advanced Cell Technology researcher Jose Cibelli has also demonstrated another way to engineer an embryo, one that might raise fewer ethical qualms. During his cloning work, he coaxed a human egg to begin dividing and developing into an embryo without the addition of sperm or DNA of any kind--a process known as parthenogenesis, from the Greek for "virgin birth."
As eggs form, they normally shuck half their chromosomes. An egg can't start dividing and forming an embryo until a sperm cell replaces the missing chromosomes. But Cibelli tricked eggs into keeping copies of their chromosomes, so they ...