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Creation movie |
For the first time in history we are seeing instead of a sperm, a cell containing the complete genetic make up of a human go into a human egg. And now I'm going to go backward very slowly. The first egg now has Judson's skin cell inside it. Jose Cibelli then injects the remaining eggs with skin cells. He will use chemicals to shock each egg into behaving as if it had been fertilized. If it works they will divide. The egg's still waits for a sperm. If we don't do anything they are just going to sit there. So we are going to let it sit there for about two hours, and then we're going to trigger development artificially, without sperm. If these eggs divide we will be a step closer to the age of truly personalized medicine. And stem cells will have wider usage than just building body parts. They could also provide treatments for diseases like diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Ultimately, perhaps, they could be used to replace older cells. Delaying the ageing process. But these dreams lie in the future. For now, Jose Cibelli has to wait. It will be two days before he knows if the eggs have divided. Jose Cibelli is trying to grow an embryo for stem cells. Even advocates of such research are aware that many people will find this unacceptable. These advances in modern medicine and biology are really getting to the core of what life is, and that makes many people very uncomfortable. All you have at the beginning for the first two weeks is a mass of cells, and when you want to make embryonic stem cells what you're doing is taking cells from this initial embryo, which is just a mass of cells. So it is alive in the sense that, yes, it's a human life, but it's not alive in the sense of being conscious. And I think there's quite a difference between conscious life and cellular life. At the moment, human embryos are the best source of stem cells. Until new sources of stem cells are found the debate about their use will continue. Jose Cibelli is about to discover if the eggs have divided or cleaved. If the eggs have divided while in this incubator, Jose will have produced the first few cells of Judson Somerville's clone. For one of the main fears about this technology is that it will not stop at cloning stem cells. Going from cloning a few cells to cloning a child would be a huge leap. But there will be demand, in some cases, hard to resist. There are certain human situations where one has lots of sympathy for the people involved. In the future, stem cells might help children. But what really stirs his father's imagination is the prospect of cloning him. It might seem that cloning a child would be like bringing him or her back to life. But geneticist John Burn (Prof, Clinical Geneticist, Newcastle University) thinks such notions are fundamentally flawed. People often think about cloned humans as sort of huge photocopies. But of course, they're nothing like that. lf you take an adult cell from an adult person and create a new embryo, then you would be producing the same genetic make up, but in a different womb, in a different generation, so they would be nothing like as similar as, for example, identical twins that have formed naturally. A clone might look the same, but could never really be the same because of the influence of the environment. We know from looking at identical twins that they're not actually identical. |
The outside world will have an influence on how a person develops, quite apart from their genes. And it's not just what happens after you're born; it's also what happens to you in the womb that will have an enormous impact. In other words, we are a combination of our nature and our nurture. As early as 24 weeks a fetus can hear and respond to the world around him. Its growing brain is literally shaped by what it hears. There has been sort of some evidence to suggest that classical music particularly to stimulate the brain and not particularly in a musical sense, but just can contribute towards intelligence in general. So obviously we want clever babies, so anything like that that would it's worth trying. Sara and Carl know that their triplets will be physically identical, but want to encourage their personalities to differ. The first thing we said we'd do, we wouldn't dress them identically. I think it would be quite important for people to be able to see them as three individual boys, that they look different for a start, as to if they're all dressed differently, I think that would help. Sara and Carl made lots of preparations for the birth of the triplets. But nothing could really prepare them for the shock of the babies' sudden arrival - seven weeks early. The triplets were born on August 17th, 2001 they all came out really quickly, and they were all crying as soon as they came out, which was nice. Now they've gone off to Special Care. Three new humans have been successfully conceived, survived the perils of an early birth and are in perfect condition. These three identical boys started out as a single embryo. They will have different experiences and different memories. But they will always be influenced by the fact that they are nature's clones. At "Advanced Cell Technology", Jose's attempts of cloning have been more frustrating. By early October he had injected over forty human eggs with DNA, none had divided. So, when on October 12th Jose Cibelli looked at his latest batch of eggs, he expected to be disappointed yet again. Jose Cibelli had done something no one had ever done before, created a cloned human embryo. His success made world headlines. Despite the media attention, as Jose Cibelli drives home, he knows he is only at the beginning of his scientific journey. He has so far grown an embryo to the six cell stage. To recover stem cells, which are his goal, he needs to grow an embryo of at least fifty cells. So when we get to that point, that's going to be a big deal. There are still a lot of challenges; a lot of risk, there's a long way to go. It's like the first flight of the Wright brothers. How fast and how far this science will really fly is completely unpredictable. Opponents will try to have it outlawed. But it is unlikely that such research can now be stopped. Creation movie description: clones ruled the world, this process called Therapeutic Cloning could transform the lives of many people. Biologists are learning how to clone. |
![]() The cells multiplied by cloning |
![]() Prof. Lee Silver, molecular biologist, Princenton University |
![]() Embryo split into three to form identical triplets |
![]() They also cloned a rare ox called a Gower |
![]() I'm going to take one of these cells and inject it into an egg |
Creation movie quotes with snapshot frame picture |
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Paul Nurse, winner of a Nobel Prize for his work on cell division, is well aware that the growing ability to manipulate DNA... in modern biology is going on inside this building (Advanced Cell Technology, Worcester, Massachusetts). In here, they're about to attempt something that has never been done before... Doctor Jose Cibelli (Vice President of Research, ACT) is working late, because he will start an extraordinary experiment...
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this process called Therapeutic Cloning could transform the lives of many people. A recent survey is saying that about 120 million people can potentially benefit from this therapy, so this is a revolution in medicine. And such a revolution could impact on all our lives. Using cloned stem cells doctors will grow spare parts that are exact doubles of the originals. Doctor Tony Atala (Director of Tissue Emgineering Chilrens Hospital, Boston) is fascinated by the potential of stem cells.
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