Scientists in the U.S. have cloned two older people – one aged 35, the other 75 – into early-stage embryos, and then derived genetically-matched tissue through that process. Gautam Naik reports on Lunch Break. Photo: Young Jung 
 
 Scientists for the first time have cloned cells from two adults to create early-stage embryos, and then derived tissue from those embryos that perfectly matched the DNA of the donors. 
 
 The experiment represents another advance in the quest to make tissue in the laboratory that could treat a range of maladies, from heart attacks to Alzheimer's. The study, involving a 35-year-old man and one age 75, was published Thursday in the journal Cell Stem Cell. 
 
 The creation of the first early-stage human clones, using infant and fetal cells rather than those from adults, was reported last year. The new experiment, with a few tweaks, confirms that striking and controversial breakthrough and also shows the technique works on mature cells. 
 
 "The proportion of diseases you can treat with [lab-made tissue] increases with age. So if you can't do this with adult cells, it is of limited value," said Robert Lanza, co-author of the study and chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology Inc. ACTC -0.68% Advanced Cell Technology Inc. U.S.: OTC $0.06 -0.00 -0.68% P/E Ratio N/A Market Cap $162.45 Million Dividend Yield N/A Rev. per Employee $5,920.66 04/17/14 Scientists Make First Embryo C... More quote details and news » ACTC in Your Value Your Change Short position of Marlborough, Mass. The study was funded in part by the government of Korea and done at a lab in California. 
 
 Such experiments are controversial because when cells are extracted from an early-stage human embryo, it destroys the embryo, which some people believe is equivalent to taking a life. 
 
 And while the embryos created in these recent experiments may have certain limitations that would prevent them from giving rise to a human clone even if implanted in a womb, that prospect is now scientifically closer. 
 
 As with the 2013 experiment, done by researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University, Dr. Lanza and his colleagues first extracted the DNA from an unfertilized human egg and replaced it with the DNA from one of the older donors. The egg automatically "reprogrammed" its DNA until it reached a stage of the embryo known as a blastocyst—a hollow ball of 50 to 100 cells. 
 
 Cells from the blastocyst then were cultured in a lab dish and yielded stem cells that were an exact match to the donor's DNA. Those stem cells subsequently were turned into other tissue types, such as heart cells, which potentially could be transplanted into the patient without triggering an immune rejection. 
 
 "I'm happy to hear that our experiment was verified and shown to be genuine," said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a development biologist at Oregon Health and Science University, in Portland, Ore., who led the 2013 study that Dr. Lanza and his colleagues have now replicated. 
 
 DNA is extracted from an unfertilized human egg, the first step in the cloning process that led to the creation of an embryo from adult cells. Young Chung 
 
 Despite this advance, experts say it wouldn't be easy to create a full-fledged human clone. Scientists have been trying for years to clone monkeys and have yet to succeed. Even the cloning of less-complicated creatures—from sheep to rabbits and dogs—required years of tweaking, and lots of wasted eggs and deformed fetuses, before it worked. 
 
 The recent experiments, nonetheless, have some observers worried. Dozens of countries have laws explicitly banning human reproductive cloning, though there is no equivalent federal law in the U.S. Most U.S. states don't have such laws either, though a few, such as California, do. 
 
 "If we're closer to some rogue scientist or fertility doctor using published techniques to create cloned humans, it certainly ups the stakes and means we should be moving to put a federal law in place," said Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a nonprofit public interest group in Berkeley, Calif. 
 
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 Researchers say they have made powerful stem cells from both young and old adults using cloning techniques, and also found clues about why it is so difficult to do this with human beings. 
 
 The team, at Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology and the Institute for Stem Cell Research in Los Angeles, say they used the cloning methods to create the stem cells to match a 35-year-old man and a 75-year-old man. 
 
 They used a bit of skin from each man, took the DNA from the skin cells and inserted it into the egg cell of a female donor, and grew very early embryos called blastocysts, the team reports in the journal Cell Stem Cell. Cells from these embryos closely match the men and could, in theory, be used to make near-identical tissue, blood or organ transplants for the men. 
 
 If verified, it would be only the second confirmed time someone’s been able to use cloning methods to make human embryonic stem cells, considered the body’s master cells. 
 
 “Therapeutic cloning has long been envisioned as a means for generating patient-specific stem cells that could be used to treat a range of age-related diseases,” said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer for Advanced Cell Technology. 
 
 “However, despite cloning success in animals, the derivation of stem cells from cloned human embryos has proven elusive. Only one group has ever succeeded, and their lines were generated using fetal and infant cells.” 
 
 That was last year, at Oregon Health & Science University. 
 
 When human embryonic stem cells were first discovered in 1998, scientists immediately dreamed of using cloning technology to help people grow their own organ and tissue transplants, and to use them to study disease. They’d be perfect genetic matches for each patient, meaning an end to a lifetime of taking dangerous immune-suppressing drugs after an organ transplant. 
 
 But in the many years since, no lab’s been able to do the work easily. It seems it is much harder to clone a human being than it is to clone a sheep, a frog or a mouse. 
 
 And using the cloning technique is controversial, because it involves creating, then destroying, a human embryo. 
 
 “Without regulations in place, such embryos could also be used for human reproductive cloning, although this would be unsafe and grossly unethical,” Lanza told NBC News. 
 
 “We also saw that the embryos that developed the furthest were from the same egg donors, suggesting that genetic variation between egg donors plays an important role in the developmental potential of cloned embryos.” ||||| Scientists have grown stem cells from adults using cloning techniques for the first time — bringing them closer to developing patient-specific lines of cells that can be used to treat a whole host of ailments, from heart disease to blindness. 
 
 The research, described in Thursday’s online edition of the journal Cell Stem Cell, is a controversial advance likely to reopen the debate over the ethics of human cloning. 
 
 The scientists’ technique was similar to the one used in the first clone of a mammal, Dolly the sheep, which was created in 1996. 
 
 They “reprogrammed” an egg cell by removing its DNA and replaced it with that of an adult donor. Scientists then zapped the cell with electricity, which made it divide and multiply. The resulting cells were identical in DNA to the donor. 
 
 The first success in humans was reported last year by scientists at the Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center. But they used donor cells from infants. In this study, the cells came from two men, a 35-year-old and a 75-year-old. 
 
 Paul Knoepfler, an associate professor at the University of California at Davis who studies stem cells, called the new research “exciting, important, and technically convincing.” 
 
 “In theory you could use those stem cells to produce almost any kind of cell and give it back to a person as a therapy,” he said. 
 
 In their paper, Young Gie Chung from the Research Institute for Stem Cell Research for CHA Health Systems in Los Angeles, Robert Lanza from Advanced Cell Technology in Marlborough, Mass., and their co-authors emphasized the promise of the technology for new therapies. What they didn’t mention but was clear to those working with stem cells was that their work was also an important discovery for human cloning. 
 
 While the research published Thursday involves cells that are technically an early stage embryo, the intention is not to try to grow them into a fully formed human. However the techniques in theory could be a first step toward creating a baby with the same genetic makeup as a donor. 
 
 Bioethicists call this the “dual-use dilemma.” 
 
 Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Berkeley, Calif.-based Center for Genetics and Society, explained that many technologies developed for good can be used in ways that the inventor may not have intended and may not like. 
 
 “This and every technical advance in cloning human tissue raises the possibility that somebody will use it to clone a human being, and that is a prospect everyone is against,” Darnovsky said. 
 
 The research was conducted in California by a large team that included representatives from both academia and industry and was funded by a private medical foundation and South Korea’s Ministry of Science. 
 
 From a technical standpoint, the technique — called somatic-cell nuclear transfer — is far from perfect. Chung’s team attempted the cloning 39 times and only two tries produced embryos. At first they couldn’t get the cells to multiply. But it turned out that if the researchers waited two hours — instead of 30 minutes — before trying to coax the cells, it worked. 
 
 “We have reaffirmed that it is possible to generate patient-specific stem cells using [this] technology,” Chung said. 
 
 Shoukhrat Mitalipov, director of the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at Oregon Health & Science University, developed the method that Chung’s group built upon. He emphasized that the work involves eggs that have not been fertilized. 
 
 “There will always be opposition to embryonic research, but the potential benefits are huge,” Mitalipov said. 
 
 Seventeen years ago, news about Dolly’s birth led to impassioned calls for a ban on human cloning for the purpose of producing a baby who is a genetic copy of someone else. Several countries took measures to limit or outlaw such work. But in the United States, the issue became entangled in the politics of abortion, and Congress became deadlocked. Some lawmakers called for a ban on reproductive human cloning, but others refused to support such legislation unless it included a ban on human cloning whether it was for the purposes of reproduction or for the development of new therapies. 
 
 President George W. Bush brokered a compromise of sorts, restricting federal funding from stem cell research that results in harm to a human embryo. 
 
 At least 15 states have laws addressing human cloning. About half of them ban both reproductive and therapeutic cloning. 
 
 Since embryonic stem cell research began to take off 15 years ago, one of the main challenges scientists have faced is getting the material for their experiments. Many had been getting the cells from embryos left over from fertility treatments, but religious groups such as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops vehemently objected to this, arguing that it involves killing a human being because the research involved fertilized eggs. 
 
 About seven years ago, scientists discovered they could use a different, molecular approach, called induced pluripotent stem cells, that could turn ordinary cells into stem cells without the need for an egg. While this technique did not present the same ethical issues, researchers soon found that some of the new cells had glitches, and there is still debate over how significant the flaws are. The research conducted by Mitalipov and Chung provides a second way of producing those cells through laboratory techniques.
– A team of researchers has made a sure-to-be controversial breakthrough in both stem cell and cloning research, creating stem cells from two adults using cloning techniques. The researchers took DNA from skin cells from two men, aged 35 and 75, and injected it into unfertilized eggs whose DNA had been removed, NBC News explains. They then zapped the eggs with electricity to coax them into dividing until they became early-stage embryos, which were then used to make embryonic stem cells—with DNA identical to the donors. In theory, the technique could be used to produce tissue perfectly suited to patients. The technique has been carried out successfully once before, but using cells from infants. "If you can't do this with adult cells, it is of limited value," a study co-author tells the Wall Street Journal, because there are more diseases the therapy can treat for adults. What the research paper leaves unsaid is that this is also a breakthrough in human cloning, the Washington Post points out. While the very early-stage embryos might not be viable in a womb, the prospect is now closer.