Tuesday May 21, 2013 Last week researchers at Oregon Health and
Science announced they had made human embryo clones using skin
cells. The technique was similar to the one used to clone Dolly,
the sheep, almost 20 years ago. Why has it taken so long to
clone humans? Are we that different than sheep? In fact, cloning
resarch has a long history and there has been pretty continuous
progress with mammalian cloning over the past 25 years. Mice,
dogs, cats, and even camels have been cloned. The latest result
in Oregon is only the most recent discovery in a field that has
been gradually unraveling the processes of how a single cell can
develop into complex organism for over 100 years starting with
work on sea urchins. Of course, this recent work by the lab in
Oregon has received much more attention than most other cloning
experiments because it involves humans. The experiment sparked
immediate controversy as soon as it was published. However, as a
recent USA Today article points out, a clone is basically an
identical