Creator of Dolly permitted to work on human eggs

A licence to work with human eggs in an experiment that prepares the way for the first human cloning in Britain has been granted to Prof Ian Wilmut, creator of Dolly, reports Vijay Dutt.

A licence to work with human eggs in an experiment that prepares the way for the first human cloning in Britain has been granted to Prof Ian Wilmut, creator of the first cloned sheep Dolly, at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh.

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The licence to carry out human parthenogenesis---a Greek word for virgin births - will help provide insights into how to boost the supply of human eggs for fertility treatments. It will also help to refine plans to use cloning to create stem cells from a patient's own tissue for research and treatments for a variety of diseases.

Most plants can multiply by parthenogenesis and so do all fungi and several animals. But it is impossible for a human being because a process called imprinting means that human embryos need maternal and paternal genes to develop.

But scientists say that it maybe possible to use a shock of electricity or chemicals to make a human egg divide for a few days as a parthenogenetic embryo before dying. The Roslin wishes to make parthenogenetic human embryos to test if its attempts to ripen immature human eggs have been successful.

Success, it is claimed, will be crucial to meet the shortage of human eggs for research on cloning of human embryos which could provide stem cells from individual patients for the study of serious genetic disease or for novel treatments. This might also help women undergoing IVF treatment.

Sources said that Roslin might now soon be in a position to get permission for a proposal it is developing to clone human embryos to produce stem cells for treatments.