Life Links 10/9/07

Harvard University and researcher Kevin Eggan have utterly failed at human cloning. They haven't even gotten started because after spending $100,000 an advertisements, they can't find a single woman willing to go through the various procedures required to donate eggs. Eggan blames a Massachusetts law which prevents him from buying human eggs.


Paul Long of the Michigan Catholic Conference in the Detroit News on how "Embryonic hype overshadows adult stem cell success stories."

"They'll otherwise be discarded" is the clichéd argument. But once the very limited number of frozen embryos are unconscionably destroyed in the hopes of finding the same treatments and cures that have already been found with adult stem cells, from where will surplus embryos come?

A researcher in England has been working on using stem cells from the placenta and amniotic fluid in the hopes of eventually treating unborn children suffering from muscular dystrophy and brittle bone disease.