Scientists at Stemagen Corp, a reproductive lab in La Jolla, California said in an article published in the peer-reviewed journal Stem Cells that they had successfully inserted DNA from adult male skin cells into a donor egg that had had its genetic material removed. This is not a very important advance in the field, because they did not manage to extract stem cell lines.

Infamous Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk claimed a few years ago that he created such stem cell lines, but it was later proven he forged the research.

On Friday, Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, who heads the Pontifical Academy for Life, condemned the cloning of human embryos. "This ranks among the most morally illicit acts, ethically speaking," said Sgreccia. Such experiments are the "worst exploitation of the human being which thus becomes an object of research," he said.

Scientists who were not involved in the research downplayed the importance of the small advance in the cloning field by Stemagen because it is basically technical.

The other approach to obtaining stem cells, the so-called nuclear reprogramming technique, is much more interesting in the long term. While "therapeutic" cloning produces stem cells, the technology involves the creation and destruction of embryos, which is ethically unsound. The stem cells created also run the high risk of being rejected by the recipient's body. In turn, nuclear reprogramming, creates stem-like cells from the patient's own cells, avoiding both medical and ethical problems.

Researchers in Japan and the US were able to successfully "rewind" adult cells back to their embryonic state using the nuclear reprogramming technique. However, it will take many years for the process to be deemed safe for actual use of the resulting stem cells in humans. Dolly's cloner, Sir Ian Wilmut, also endorsed this technique and declared last year he abandoned the idea of human cloning in favor of nuclear reprogramming.

The problem with human cloning is that it makes technical use of human life. For its convenience, our society has arbitrarily decided that human life begins at a certain stage of a person's development. Religious and ethical groups argue instead that such a distinction is artificial and wrong and human life is sacred regardless of its stage of development. Thus the destruction of embryos for scientific experiments amounts to mass killing of human lives, they argue.

As far as I am concerned, as long as there is a choice, I would rather see billions of dollars go to nuclear reprogramming research, which is less dubious, instead of cloning.

In November last year, researchers at the Oregon Health & Science University have created for the first time cloned embryos of monkeys from which they extracted stem cells. Despite the apparent success, the technique had a very high rate of failure: of 304 eggs from 14 rhesus macaque monkeys, only two stem cell lines resulted.