Researchers make cloning breakthrough

[ringmastery]

How is this controversial? An embryo is not a person. If it can cure diseases, great.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040212/ap_on_sc/therapeutic_cloning&cid=624&ncid=716

WASHINGTON - Researchers in South Korea (news - web sites) have become the first to successfully clone a human embryo, and then cull from it master stem cells that many doctors consider key to one day creating customized cures for diabetes, Parkinson's and other diseases.

This is not cloning to make babies, but to create medicine.

It's sure to revive international controversy over whether to ban all human cloning, as the Bush administration wants, or to allow this "therapeutic cloning" that might eventually let patients grow their own replacement tissue.

Embryonic stem cells are the body's building blocks, cells from which all other tissue types spring. They're present in an embryo only days after conception and are ethically sensitive because culling stem cells destroys the embryo.

Scientists have used therapeutic cloning to partially cure laboratory mice with an immune system disease. And they know how to cull stem cells from human embryos left over in fertility clinics.