LONDON - Professor Chris Shaw and Professor Ian Wilmut, the creator of the cloned sheep Dolly, are seeking permission to create hybrid embryos of human cells and rabbit eggs, so that they can overcome the shortage of human eggs for research purposes.
They also say that these hybrid embryos can be used to create stem cells having genetic defects that can make the study of the mechanisms behind many prevalent genetic diseases easy to understand.
However critics have taken a strong view of these proposals and have branded them as "repugnant" But Professor Shaw clarified by saying that the fertility of rabbits makes it easier for them to acquire as much eggs as they want, "The most important thing is that with animal eggs, we have a much better chance of generating stem cells and if we wait for human eggs, it's going to be maybe a decade before we can do this," he explained.
The problem with research at the moment is that a shortage of human eggs is curtailing the amount of work that can be done in this direction. Researchers use embryos to harvest stem cells that carry the same genetic defect as is prevalent in humans. By studying these defects at the molecular level, scientists hope to understand the mechanism underlying the defect, thereby opening up new avenues for treatment. It is to overcome this shortage of human eggs that Professor Shaw's team wants to use rabbits' eggs.
But they will need a license from the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority before they can proceed on this path. "As with all research involving human embryos, the research team would have to show that the research is both necessary and desirable," pointed out Dr Chris O'Toole, chief of research regulation at the HFEA.
Posted
on : Mon, 16 Jan 2006 08:25 GMT | General News
By : Anne Philips
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