"The destruction of such an organism does not change the moral wrongness of the initial action," said Gomez-Lobo, who called the research "a violation of human dignity."
Scientists say human cloning can help cure diseases, or at least help us better understand them. Extracting and observing the growth of stem cells from an embryo cloned from an ailing patient will give them unrivaled insight into how diseases develop.
The problem is how to obtain the eggs. Cloning is notoriously inefficient; only 3 percent to 4 percent of animal eggs used in cloning procedures result in live births, and no one has ever credibly reported cloning a human embryo. The field was thrown into turmoil in 2005 when Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk's claim that he'd cloned a human embryo was exposed as a fraud.
And for a woman, donating eggs is a significant undertaking and requires taking hormone injections, which can be risky.
"You cannot in good faith justify women undergoing this procedure for no medical benefit," Minger said. "These eggs for the most part are going to be wasted." Scientists have been successful in a handful of interspecies cloning projects involving closely related species, including creating a wild ox called a banteng in a cow's egg.
But Cibelli, who will soon publish data in a scientific journal detailing his failure to clone monkey genes in a cow eggs, doubts the proposed experiments will work.
"It could be that we are doing something wrong," Cibelli said.
"But it looks like the farther apart the species are on the evolutionary tree, the harder it will be to clone."
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