Sunday, February 28, 2010

Therapeutic Cloning

Somatic cell nuclear transfer can also be used to create a clonal embryo. The most likely scenario for this is to produce embryos for use in research, particularly stem cell research. This process is also called "research cloning" or "therapeutic cloning."
Therapeutic cloning is the production of human embryos for use in research. The goal of this process is not to create cloned human beings, but rather to harvest stem cells that can be used to study human development and to treat disease. Stem cells are important to biomedical researchers because they can be used to generate virtually any type of specialized cell in the human body. Stem cells are extracted from the egg after it has divided for 5 days. The egg at this stage of development is called a blastocyst. Many researchers hope that one day stem cells can be used to serve as replacement cells to treat heart disease, Alzheimer's, cancer, and other diseases.

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