This is actually one of the best articles that I've seen on this subject, with an excellent discussion of the technique, the ethical dilemmas, and the controversies.
What they did was make clones of sick people to obtain stem cells from the human cloned embryos.
Those stem cells are specific to the patient who donated the nuclear DNA and the scientists will have to find the key to treating the disease - and that will be the treatment for the one person who was cloned.
In order to do this, they used an average of 17 oocytes (eggs) for each stem cell line. I haven't seen how many clones were produced, but 11 stem cell lines were produced from 9 patients. So at least 220 oocytes - harvested from healthy young women - at least in 17 of the 18 women who donated, since one of the 18 was one of the nuclear DNA donors who donated her own oocytes as well - by laparoscopy after treatment to produce superovulation - were used.
The problem is that at least 11 cloned humans were created for the purpose of killing them and harvesting their inner cell mass.
From the article:
""Scientists say they know the word "cloning" raises fears of actual babies that are clones, but say they have no intention of doing such work. The South Korean government, which paid for the new study, has made it a criminal offense to implant a cloned embryo into a woman's uterus, Dr. Hwang said. "It should be banned throughout the world," he added.
Few would venture into the cloning arena if the science were not so promising, researchers say.
Of course, they add, there is a long way to go from stem cells to therapy. "It's going to take a lot of work," said Dr. Ronald McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institutes of Health. "But we want this to work - it's not a theory. My technical and professional judgment tells me this is really important."
But Dr. Kass of the President's Council on Bioethics says that cloning and extracting stem cells from the embryos are not the only ways to do such work. He notes that the majority of the council called for a moratorium on cloning for research. And, he said, the council recently suggested other ways of getting stem cells that could develop into the desired tissue types and that would match a patient's own cells, "without these violations and moral hazards."
Opinion polls have had varied results, often depending on the words that are used to describe the work. In one recent Gallup poll, just 38 percent of respondents approved of cloning embryos for research. Another poll, that used the term "somatic cell nuclear transfer" instead of "cloning" found that 72 percent approved.
Dr. Hwang's paper goes a step further, using "S.C.N.T." instead of "somatic cell nuclear transfer" and then dropping the first two letters and calling the process "N.T."""
That number is almost the same as national dem registration. Go figure. Who are the knee-jerks?