New funding announced today will allow the Bedford Stem Cell Research Foundation near Boston, Massachusetts, to resume its stem cell research on unfertilized human eggs, the first such program in the United States. The research has been interrupted four times because of lack of funding.
Most scientific and medical advances are accompanied by new terms to describe the new processes. Unfortunately, that has not happened with the new tasks eggs are being asked to perform. As a consequence, the term embryo has been mistakenly applied to all forms of activated eggs, and that is causing rancorous debate. The biology of…
WASHINGTON — Three years ago, President Bush used his first televised presidential address to put the emotional issue of embryonic stem-cell research behind him. He unveiled a compromise: The federal government would, for the first time, provide funding for the research, but wouldn’t pay for work that required new embryos to be destroyed. Scientists and…
BRF scientists were successful in their first attempt to repeat the ground-breaking work of Dr. Hans Scholer, the Keynote Speaker at the BRF Activated Egg Symposium in Nov, 2003. He described the development of mouse eggs from stem cells in his University of Pennsylvania laboratory.
Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) technology has recently been used to generate animals with a common genetic composition. In this study, we report the derivation of a pluripotent embryonic stem cell line (SCNT-hES-1) from a cloned human blastocyst. SCNT-hES-1 cells display typical ES cell morphology and cell surface markers and are capable of differentiating into…
Little is known of molecular requirements for specification of human germ cells. However, it is likely that they are specified through the action of sequentially expressed genes just as in model organisms. We sought to determine whether human embryonic stem (ES) cell lines, like those of mice, might be capable of forming germ cells in…
A report on the workshop held March, 2003 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Human therapeutic cloning requires the reprogramming of a somatic cell by nuclear transfer to generate autologous totipotent stem cells. We have parthenogenetically activated 22 human eggs and also performed nuclear transfer in 17 metaphase II eggs. Cleavage beyond the eight-cell stage was obtained in the parthenogenetic-activate d eggs, and blastocoele cavities were observed in six….
Background: Embryonic stem (ES) cells are lines of cells that are isolated from blastocysts. The murine ES cells were demonstrated to be true pluripotent cells as they differentiate into all embryonic lineages. Yet, in vitro differentiation of rhesus ES cells was somewhat inconsistent and disorganized. The recent isolation of human ES cells calls for exploring…
The reservoir of HIV-1 in semen is unknown. Semen is comprised of secretions and cells from seminal vesicles, prostate, testis, epididymis, and ejaculatory ducts; leucocytes are present in semen, although their source and their role in the semen viral burden is unclear. Reports that semen viral RNA concentrations do not correlate with those in plasma,…