The new breakthrough in cloning from South Korea is terrific news, but in many ways it's not at all surprising. Cloning by transplanting somatic cells into enucleated ova has been around for decades—we all knew that all it would take to get it done in humans was persistence and meticulous diligence and practice, practice, practice. This is not to belittle the accomplishment of Hwang's team, who have done an amazing job, but to point out what must be the frustration of being a reproductive biologist in GW Bush's America.

Carl Zimmer discusses the ironies involved:

Leonard Krishtalka, the director of the Kansas University Natural History Museum, was quoted pointing out how Kansas is raising $500 million to foster a bioscience and biotech industry in the state. It was ironic, he said, that the state's board of education was simultaneously "trying to remove and water down the basic fundamental concept of evolution that underlies all of biology."

Case in point: try to imagine a stem cell therapy company deciding where to set up shop. I doubt they'd be excited about a state that doesn't make sure their high school students understood mutations, natural selection, the origin of species, the fossil record, and all the other elements of evolutionary biology--that thinks it's fine just to claim that the broken sugar gene in our genome was just stuck there for reasons unknown by some mysterious designer.

Everything in biology is connected. You don't get to pick and choose which piece you should 'believe' in, and which pieces to reject, on anything other than the evidence. When the Kansas school board says they refuse to accept the central principles of biology, they don't get to turn around and say, "we'd like the benefits of cutting edge biomedical technology, please." When you cut down the tree, you don't get the apples.

And oh, the possible benefits! The South Korean cell lines have interesting sources, as a Science news article describes:

Nine of the 11 cell lines are derived from people, ranging in age from 10 to 56, who have suffered spinal cord injuries. The team has begun to test some of the lines in animal models of spinal cord injury, but Hwang cautions that they remain years away from transplanting the cells into people. "We have to be overconvinced" that the cells are safe, he says.

Another line is derived from a 2-year-old boy who has congenital hypogammaglobulonemia, a genetic immune deficiency. In theory, scientists could correct the genetic defect in the stem cells and then reinject them into the boy. Indeed, Jaenisch, Daley, and their colleagues have used such a strategy to treat mice with a similar genetic defect. Nevertheless, Hwang stresses that the boy's parents and the spinal cord patients were explicitly told that the team's research was unlikely to help them directly--even though the informed consent form used was, by Korean law, mandated to suggest such a possibility.

Although also unlikely to be employed for treatment, another ES cell line, derived from a 6-year-old type 1 diabetes patient, should interest scientists. "The possibility of being able to study disease in a culture dish is very exciting," says Douglas Melton of Harvard University, who has recently received permission from the school's ethics committee to derive ES cells from diabetes patients. "If we could make T cells and β cells in a dish--we're not there yet, but we're getting closer--then we could compare the diabetic cells to wild-type cells and ask what goes wrong," he explains. "For the first time we will have a chance to study the root causes of the disease."

Do you know anyone with diabetes? How do you think doctors will ever come up with a cure? These are the tools biomedical researchers need.

Of course, there will always be ethical issues. This isn't trivial stuff, and it isn't easy. Here's one problem that will have the religious right screaming (and troubles me a bit, too).

One important factor in his team's success, Hwang says, was the use of freshly harvested oocytes from fertile women instead of ones left over from fertility treatments. The age of donors may also be key. Whereas oocytes from women in their 30s yielded on average one ES cell line for every 30 tries, those from younger donors yielded one line for every 13 tries. In nine cases, it took only a single donation of oocytes from a woman to produce a new line. (Each donation yields about 10 oocytes.)

The religious right will freak out because of goofy ideas about the sacredness of eggs, but I don't like it because it is more incentive to take advantage of young women, although at least the National Academies discourage payment for oocytes. The thing is, I think the way to get over this ethical hurdle is to allow scientists to do the research and figure out how to improve success rates, minimize oocyte use, and streamline the whole process. Burying our heads in dogma does not solve any problems.

Vogel G (2005) Korean Team Speeds Up Creation Of Cloned Human Stem Cells. Science 308(5725):1096-1097.