AT FIRST sight, Richard Seed seems a serious contender in the race to produce the first human clone. He trained as a physicist, but turned to reproductive technology 20 years ago when he founded a company to transfer embryos from prize cows to surrogate mothers. Then, in the 1980s, he launched a company called Fertility and Genetics to apply the technique to people, using it to move fertilised eggs from healthy women, inseminated several days before, to those with fertility problems.
That effort resulted in publications in The Lancet and The Journal of the American Medical Association, with one 1984 JAMA paper (vol 251, p 889) reporting the birth of a healthy child. At the time, this embryo transfer was a competing technology to IVF, but it never caught on. "Seed has enough credentials to make you listen," says Lori Andrews, an expert on the legal issues surrounding reproduction at Chicago-Kent College of Law. "But so many people are far ahead of him."
In interviews last week, Seed did not acknowledge that cloning a person would pose a far greater challenge than his previous work.
This is in character, says Maria Bustillo of the South Florida Institute for Reproductive Medicine in Miami, a coauthor on some of his papers. "He was always kind of eccentric with a lot of grandiose ideas, but I'm not worried. He's not capable of pulling this off." While Seed provided money for the research on which she collaborated, Bustillo notes, his scientific input was limited.
source: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg15721170.300 23dec04
|
To
send us your comments, questions, and suggestions click
here |