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Genetics researcher says human cloning will be possible in the next decade

The cloning of human beings could become a reality within the next ten years, one of Taiwan's top genetics researchers said yesterday.

"If genetic technology keeps developing at its current pace, ten years shouldn't be a problem," the director of Academia Sinica's institute of molecular biology, Shen Che-kun (沈哲鯤), told participants at a genetics conference at the National Research Institute yesterday.

Now that the cloning of other animals has become possible, cloning humans is the next step, he said.

Scientists at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, first cloned a sheep, dubbed "Dolly," from the adult body cells of another sheep in 1997. It was an event that caused a media frenzy and criticism from various green groups and religious institutions.

Mice and monkeys have also been successfully cloned, but from fetal cells.

Cloning humans will use the same technique as that used to create Dolly, he said -- that is, an adult body cell will be fused with a female egg cell, placed in the uterus, and the fetus will then be brought to term.

Genetic science has become the most rapidly growing field in medicine, he said.

Private and public institutions around the world, led by the US National Institute of Health and the US-based company Celera Genomics, are working separately on parts of a map of the human genome expected to be completed within two years.

Here in Taiwan, a team from Taipei Veterans' General Hospital and National Yangming University are mapping and sequencing genes on the fourth and sixteenth human chromosomes. Results of their research on the fourth chromosome are expected to be published at the end of August.
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