KOREANS CLAIM HUMAN CLONING SUCCESS

December 15, 1998

SEOUL, (Reuters) - A South Korean medical research team said on Wednesday it has succeeded in cultivating a human embryo using human cells in one of the first cloning experiments of its kind.

Researchers at the infertility clinic of Kyunghee University Hospital in Seoul said they had cultivated a human embryo in its early stages using an unfertilised egg and a somatic cell-- those that make up most of the body-- donated by a woman in her 30s.

Lee Bo-yon, a researcher with the hospital's infertility clinic, said the human embryo in the Kyunghee University experiment was last seen dividing into four cells before the operation was aborted.

"If implanted into a uterine wall of a carrier, we can assume that a human child would be formed and that it would have the same gene characteristics as that of the donor," Lee told Reuters.

Lee said the research team would not attempt to take the cloning experiment further until there was a social, legal and moral consensus to support it.

Lee said the experiment was, to his knowledge, one of the first to use only human cells in a cloning experiment.

"To our knowledge the Roslin Institute has already succeeded in this experiment, making us the second," Lee said, but added that he had not been able to confirm that himself.

Lee said the experiment he conducted with his supervisor, Kim Sung-bo, used the same technique as that of Teruhiko Wakayama of the University of Hawaii, which was conducted with mice.

In July, Wakayama and his supervisor, Ryuzo Yanagimachi, said they had produced 50 cloned mice from several different adults.

The so-called Honolulu Technique is different from the technology used to create the now famous Dolly in 1996.

Dolly's makers at Scotland's Roslin Institute used an electric current to fuse a cell from a sheep's mammary gland with the egg from another sheep that had the nucleus removed.

The Hawaiian researchers said they scraped the DNA material out of the nucleus from a mouse egg and injected the nucleus of another mouse into it.

They then "chemically activated," or tricked the egg, into acting like a newly fertilised egg and start growing.

The embryo was transferred into a surrogate mother, who gave birth to what the researchers believed were cloned mice.

They then cloned the clone, and cloned that clone, essentially making one mouse both grandmother and the identical twin of the other.

South Korea, like other countries, is grappling with the issue.

An official in the science ministry's research and development department said the ministry was waiting for the National Assembly to pass legislation on human cloning.

Some Korean lawmakers have said they would support limiting the research and development budgets of state-supported researchers if they continued cloning experiments.