Scientists in the U.S. believe they have been able to treat mice that have Parkinson’s disease using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) which was the same process used to create Dolly the sheep. (Some like to euphemistically call this procedure “therapeutic cloning” but they’re only right about the “cloning” part because there is nothing “therapeutic” in the procedure for the cloned embryo.) The scientists took the nucleus from a mouse cell and inserted it into a mouse egg cell. When the resulting mouse embryo developed to a certain stage it was destroyed so its stem cells could be harvested and injected into the original mouse.
As the media breathlessly reports, some scientists are hoping this type of treatment could one day be used on humans. They neglect to point out that if this research were to be done in humans it would, in effect, amount to creating a twin of the patient (a clone) only to destroy that twin at an early stage of development (embryo) for its stem cells. Cloning humans is unethical because it would violate the rights of the cloned embryo and because it cheapens human life to the level of a commodity. We should not be wasting our time and resources pursuing research we know to be unethical.
These limited results seen in mice pale in comparison to the many exciting results coming from ethical forms of adult stem cell research. Furthermore, with the new research being done in induced pluripotent stem cells (embryonic like stem cells obtained without creating or destroying embryos) we can ethically obtain pluripotent stem cells that do not appear to risk rejection from the bodies of patients.
For more information on human cloning click here.