September 26, 2023
(Nature) – When Wilmut and his colleagues embarked on their project to clone the first mammal from an adult cell, one goal was to use the technique to generate livestock that would produce pharmaceuticals in their milk. The researchers hoped … Read More
September 11, 2023
(Associated Press) – Ian Wilmut, the cloning pioneer whose work was critical to the creation of Dolly the Sheep in 1996, has died at age 79. The University of Edinburgh in Scotland said Wilmut died Sunday after a long illness … Read More
August 9, 2021
Bioethics (vol. 35, no. 1, 2021) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “Responsibility amid the Social Determinants of Health” by Ben Schwan “Autonomy and the Limits of Cognitive Enhancement” by Jonathan Lewis “Orphans by Design: The Future of … Read More
November 16, 2020
(Associated Press) – A second experimental COVID-19 vaccine — this one from Moderna Inc. — yielded extraordinarily strong early results Monday, another badly needed dose of hope as the pandemic enters a terrible new phase. Moderna said its vaccine appears … Read More
July 8, 2020
(Business Insider) We’ve been able to clone human embryos for about seven years. But as far as we know, no one’s actually cloned a whole person. Turns out, ethics aren’t the only thing holding scientists back. Cloning isn’t the sci-fi … Read More
February 28, 2020
(STAT) – Sometimes what doesn’t happen is as interesting as what does. Cloning human embryos has been possible for nearly seven years. Yet as far as I know, during that time no one has made a cloned baby or, apparently, … Read More
December 13, 2019
Bioethics (vol. 33, no. 1, 2019) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “Erosion of Informed Consent in U.S. Research” by Lois Shepherd and Ruth Macklin “Our Flawed Approach to Undue Inducement in Medical Research” by Eric Lee “Enriching … Read More
September 18, 2019
British Medical Bulletin (vol. 128, no. 1, 2018) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “Ethics and Cloning” by Matti Häyry “Epigenetics: Ethics, Politics, Biosociality” by Luca Chiapperino
September 4, 2019
(The Conversation) – Yet if China is fast becoming the world capital of controversial science, it is not alone in producing it. More babies produced using the “CRISPR” gene-editing technology are now planned by a scientist in Russia, where another … Read More
April 29, 2019
(Discover Magazine) – Those involved with the science around cloning agree. Prominent scientists involved in cloning say they’ve never had any intention of replicating a person — and are as wary of the idea as everyone else. Their research serves … Read More
February 4, 2019
(The Conversation) – It sounds like a good idea at face value – curing human disease is something most of us consider a priority. But there are some complex ethical issues at play here. First, there’s the ongoing question of how … Read More
April 16, 2018
(MIT Technology Review) – Alarm bells went off in my head. Must wasn’t just cloning a pet. She was trying to preserve a lost child. It seemed awfully close to a real human cloning scenario, one in which a heartbroken … Read More
January 24, 2018
(STAT News) – There have been mice and cows and pigs and camels, bunnies and bantengs and ferrets and dogs, but ever since Dolly the sheep became the first cloned mammal in 1996, the list has had a conspicuous hole: … Read More
December 28, 2017
(CNN) – The pup was cloned from Apple, a different dog whose genome was edited to develop the disease atherosclerosis. With that genetic information now coded in, the disease — a leading cause of stroke and heart sickness — was … Read More
November 27, 2017
(Newsweek) – Scientists have used a cloned dog to create four more dogs in an experiment to find out what happens when animals are re-cloned. The team created the dogs—Afghan hounds—with stem cells from Snuppy, the world’s first ever cloned … Read More
October 3, 2017
(Nature) – A team in China has taken a new approach to fixing disease genes in human embryos. The researchers created cloned embryos with a genetic mutation for a potentially fatal blood disorder, and then precisely corrected the DNA to … Read More
September 22, 2017
(Australian Broadcasting Co) – Scientists are pushing to overhaul human cloning laws in Australia so they can use DNA from three different people to create a baby when there is a risk of the child inheriting the debilitating and potentially … Read More
September 11, 2017
(Nature) – More than a decade after a fraud scandal in stem-cell science rocked South Korea, scientists in the field are ramping up pressure on the government to relax the country’s strict regulations on human-embryo research — which many researchers … Read More
August 14, 2017
(The Verge) – With the end of Orphan Black imminent, we’re looking at the real world for our fix of real science straddling the world of science fiction. Since the show began airing in 2013, have we gotten any closer … Read More
March 22, 2017
(Science Daily) – Since Dolly the Sheep was cloned in 1996, the question of whether human reproductive cloning should be banned or pursued has been the subject of international debate. In an attempt to address the issue, the UN formulated … Read More
February 23, 2017
(Pew Research Center) – Twenty years ago today, the world’s first clone made from the cells of an adult mammal made her public debut. Dolly, a Finn Dorset sheep, was introduced to the public in 1997 after scientists at the … Read More
February 21, 2017
(The Scientist) – The implications of cloning animals in our society were self-evident from the start. Our advancing ability to reprogram adult, already-specialized cells and start them over as something new may one day be the key to creating cells … Read More
February 17, 2017
(The Economist) – IN THE summer of 1996 Karen Mycock, a cell biologist, was attending a wedding in the Scottish highlands. Returning to her hotel to change her hat, she found a fax pushed under her door. It said: “She’s … Read More
February 17, 2017
(The Economist) – Such methods separate sexual intercourse from reproduction. Most of them bring the possibility of choosing which embryo will live, and which will die. At first they can seem bewildering—disgusting, even. But one thing experience has shown is … Read More
February 14, 2017
NanoEthics (vol. 10, no. 3, 2016) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “A Lay Ethics Quest for Technological Futures: About Tradition, Narrative and Decision-Making” by Simone van der Burg “Contrasting Medical Technology with Deprivation and Social Vulnerability. Lessons for the Ethical … Read More
