First Human Cloning

Cloning of human was previously thought to be almost impossible due to the characteristic of human eggs which will become paralysed (fail to divide) if the nucleus is removed from them. However, Dr. Woo Suk Hwang from South Korea , using human eggs (ovum) and human DNA, had created human embryos through cloning, but they had no plans to make babies who would grow up into walking, talking, duplicates of the women who had produced the eggs. Insteads, the scientist extracted stem cells from the microscopic balls of dividing cells known as blastocyst. This embryonic stem cells can become virtually any type of human tissue, potentially offering powerful treatments-even cures for damaging or diseased organs, spinal cord, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, skin transplant, organ transplant and more. Human cloning is currently a very controversial issues not only pertaining to ethic but also legal, social, moral and religious.

The South Korean researchers solved the division problem ("paralysed empty egg") by using the less matured eggs. They first "harvested" eggs from 16 volunteers, using the classic in vitro fertilization (IVF) technique (The women were given drugs to stimulate their ovaries to produce multiple eggs, which were then harvested through an outpatient surgical procedure). Then the scientists replaced the nuclei in the eggs from each woman with nuclei from cells in other part of the women's body, thereby exchanging the eggs that has incomplete DNA (egg always contain half of DNA material compared to other cell in the body) with the nucleus that has complete DNA. This "complete nucleus" was actually extracted from the cells in the layers surrounding the egg. In this case, they do not use the embryos left over from attempt at IVF.

The egg which contain a new "complete DNA" will divides until they form a cell ball called blastocyst (see photo). A Blastocyst consist of 100 cells and divided into inner cells mass and outer cell mass. Cells in the inner cell mass are very special as each of them can be extracted and culture into a bacth of specialized cells or tissues such as blood cells, nerve cells, skin cells etc. Cells in the inner cells mass is also known as Stem Cells.