Scepticism around the two articals of Drs Woo Hwang and Shin Moon about stem cell - Essay Example

This raised further problems concerning human cloning, as the embryos created would contain the same genetic material as the host, creating a clone. As the scientific and ethical debate continued, extensive research was still being made, leading to the breakthrough, and later discredited research of Woo Hwang and Shin Moon. In two papers, entitled "Evidence of a Pluripotent Human Embryonic Stem Cell Line Derived from a Cloned Blastocyst" published in the journal Science on 12 March, 2004 and "Patient-Specific Embryonic Stem Cells Derived from Human SCNT Blastocysts" published in Science on 17 June, 2005, Woo Hwang and Shin Moon as primary researchers claimed that they managed to create human embryonic stem cells from a cloned embryo. . Theoretically, as the researchers state, the cytoplasm of the oocyte would deactivate certain genes concerned with somatic functions and would activate the embryonic genes located within the nucleus concerned with proliferation and differentiation.

They continue to explain one of the basic principles in stem cell research, as the inner cell mass is removed from the blastocyst, forming a specific stem cell line, that will be used either for research to or to treat a wide spectra of diseases like type I diabetes, osteoarthritis, Parkinson's disease, burn injuries as well as a variety of cardiovascular diseases, and possibly most important of all, an effective and safe transplantation and replacement therapy, as rejection would be non-existent by the host who has the same genetic material as the imported cells (Hwang et al, 2004).

Before beginning the experiments, the researchers asked and received an approval to perform the experiments by the Institutional Review Board on Human Subjects Research and Ethics Committees from Hanyang University Hospital in Seoul, South Korea. In the experiment, they used metaphase II 242 oocytes taken from consented volunteers, and after the oocyte DNA, the scientists performed a test by imaging the cells after using a fluorescent dye in order to determine that the DNA was removed from the oocytes before performing SCNT.

It should also be mentioned that at the time when the experiments were performed, an effective SCNT protocol for use on human oocytes did not exist, so the researchers had to modify several step of the procedure, including reprogramming time, or the amount of time necessary for the