US company claims to have created cloned humans

CELL SHOCKED: The Stemagen team said they got five human embryos using skin cells.

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New Delhi: In what could be a major breakthrough, a California-based company, Stemagen Corp, is claiming that it has created five cloned human embryos from adult skin cells in the hope of eventually making matched stem cells for patients.

The Stemagen team used a technique called Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, or SCNT, the same technique used to make Dolly, the sheep, in 1996, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult.

Researchers removed the nuclei of mature egg cells from healthy young women and then inserted DNA from an adult male donor into the eggs.

The technique could be used to treat diseases like juvenile diabetes.

Experts are still skeptical about the claims. If verified, the team would be the first to prove they have cloned human beings as a source of stem cells, the master cells of the body.

There are several types of stem cells. Embryonic stem cells, made from days-old embryos, are considered the most powerful because they can give rise to all the cell types in the body.

The Stemagen team said they got five human embryos using skin cells from two adult men who work at the IVF center. They said they had painstakingly verified that the embryos were clones of the two men.

(With agency inputs)