Enter the Clone Wars? A Medical Revolution, at Least
Science is nerdy, and it doesn’t get much nerdier than the science of cloning. An article in the latest New Scientist reveals a breakthrough in stem cells that could easily lead to a real revolution in medical treatment, but also opens up the cloning debate again, and in a big way.
The discovery was made by Charles Vacanti at Harvard Medical School (Side note: I thought I had met Vacanti a few years ago, but it turns out I met his brother Joseph “Jay” Vacanti — also involved in tissue engineering and a co-founder of InVivo Therapeutics) and Haruko Obokata at the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan. While it won’t exactly lead to a scenario like when Dr. McCoy gave an old woman in a 1980s hospital in San Francisco a pill and she grew new kidneys, it’s not too far off. The researchers figured out how to take any adult cell and make it into a pluripotent stem cell with simply a short exposure to environmental stress — in this case 30-minute bath in just less than lethal acid. Pluripotent means that stem cell can become any kind of cell in the body, whether it started as a skin cell, a blood cell or what have you.
But wait, there’s more. With a little more tweaking, they say they can make the cells not just pluripotent, but totipotent. The only totipotent cells that occur in nature are the few first divisions after a sperm fertilizes an egg. They are called totipotent because they not only can become all cells, they can control the cellular environment they find themselves in. In the case of mammals, those cells guide the uterus to make a placenta.
Get the significance? Now it might be possible to create a real 100 percent perfect clone. And do so after a 30-minute acid bath of almost any adult cell and a splash of growth factors for cologne.
The way cloning happens in animals today is a nucleus is removed from a stem cell and implanted into an egg cell from the host mother that has had its own nucleus stripped away. That means the clone is about 99 percent pure, but it has mitochondrial DNA from the host mother. It also means an increase in failure rates, which is why it takes so many started cloned cells to get one clone to grow to adulthood. With these new totipotent stem cells, all a cloner would have to do is put the cells into a host uterus. For a human, nine months later you get a completely exact copy of the person from which the adult cells were derived.
Hmm, I wonder if anyone has found that vial of Pope John Paul II’s blood that was stolen two days ago?
