Free Republic

In a search for novel forms of longevity medicine, a biotech company based in Israel says it intends to create embryo-stage versions of people in order to harvest tissues for use in transplant treatments.The company, Renewal Bio, is pursuing recent advances in stem-cell technology and artificial wombs demonstrated by Jacob Hanna, a biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Earlier this week, Hanna showed that starting with mouse stem cells, his lab could form highly realistic-looking mouse embryos and keep them growing in a mechanical womb for several days until they developed beating hearts, flowing blood, and cranial...

Over the last few decades, the planet has been at the mercy of a ten-legged, many-clawed crustacean ravenously creating a clone army bent on world domination. No, it isn’t an interplanetary interloper or the result of an uncontained government experiment. This is biology gone wrong, or if you happen to be a marbled crayfish, biology gone horribly right. What’s unusual is that instead of the expected two copies of their chromosomes, marbled crayfish have three. Their genetic composition is similar to the Slough crayfish, a close relative, leading scientists to conclude that the first marbled crayfish was born through an...

Identical twins, also known as monozygotic twins, come from a single embryo that divides in two early on in development. The result is two individuals that share almost the same genetic information from each parent and look almost exactly the same. Identical twins are essentially clones of one another, although genetic mutations in the womb mean they don't quite share 100% of the same DNA... It turns out that DNA isn't the only factor that influences a person's fingerprints, even though it does play a major role in determining the ridge pattern characteristics, Francese said. "Different environmental factors in the...

Great Britain's Olympic delegation features three sets of twins. Jennifer and Jessica Gadirova are members of Great Britain's women's gymnastics team. In the men's road race, identical twin cyclists Adam and Simon Yates will race for Great Britain. Twins Pat and Luke McCormack are members of Great Britain's boxing team. Twins Laura and Charlotte Tremble of France compete together in synchronized swimming. Twin sisters Sanne and Lieke Wevers are returning to the Olympics on the Netherlands' gymnastics team.

About four years ago, Kevin Sinclair inherited an army of clones. Very fluffy clones. "Daisy, Debbie, Denise and Diana," says Sinclair, a developmental biologist at the University of Nottingham in England. The sheep are just four of 13 clones that Sinclair shepherds, but they're the most famous because of their relation to Dolly, the sheep that made headlines two decades ago as the first successfully cloned mammal. " 'Sister clones' probably best describes them," Sinclair says. "They actually come from the exactly the same batch of cells that Dolly came from." Recently, Sinclair and his colleagues celebrated the sister clones'...

This year, a Chinese company plans to open a massive factory to clone 100,000 cows. Just how far will this mass reproductive technology go? Two decades after the birth of Dolly the sheep—the world’s first successfully cloned mammal—the year 2016 will likely see the rise of mass-produced animal clones, thanks to an enterprising and madcap scientist in China. Sometime in the next year, a company called Boyalife Genomics will open a massive factory in the coastal Chinese city of Tianjin, where it plans to clone 100,000 cattle per year—a way to address the Middle Kingdom’s rising appetite for beef. Eventually,...

Beijing: The Chinese scientist behind the world’s biggest cloning factory has technology advanced enough to replicate humans, he told AFP, and is only holding off for fear of the public reaction. Boyalife Group and its partners are building the giant plant in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, where it is due to go into production within the next seven months and aims for an output of one million cloned cows a year by 2020. But cattle are only the beginning of chief executive Xu Xiaochun’s ambitions....

Never mind the Romney&Perry vs Obama Polls, what we really need to see are polls with either ticket VS Obama.It seems pretty safe to assume that it's down to Perry&Romney.And in the end it may be a "Perry/Romney/Rubio(and another VP Candidate)"scenerio. Lets hope Rasmussem and Gallup starts taking these polls soon. Especially a Perry/Rubio vs Obama Poll. That would likely be a 55/45 split. Just like the Reagan/Carter landslide.

Apple is set to files its brief on Monday detailing the damages and injunction details it wants to see imposed on Psystar for building and selling unauthorized Mac clones. Apple filed a lawsuit against Psystar in Northern California several months ago claiming the small PC maker was violating the Mac OS X end user license agreement, and that it was violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with the steps it used to install the Mac operating system on PCs. Psystar claimed that it should be allowed to build and sell PCs with Mac OS X pre-installed and that Apple is...

James Symington is about to find out whether you can clone heroism. The retired Canadian police officer – who took part in the rescue operation after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York City – is scheduled to take possession Wednesday of five puppies cloned using DNA from his beloved late German shepherd Trakr, the rescue dog credited with finding the last survivor in the smoking rubble of Ground Zero. Symington, who won the opportunity to have Trakr cloned in an essay contest last year, first met his new pups in an emotional encounter on June 14. "They're...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers who tried to use mouse, cow and rabbit eggs to make human clones said on Monday the effort failed to produce workable embryos but added that they showed human cloning should work in principle. Mixing human and animal cells does not appear to program the egg properly, said Dr. Robert Lanza of Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology.

- Food and milk from the offspring of cloned animals may already have entered the U.S. food supply, the Food and Drug Administration said on Tuesday, but it would be impossible to know because there is no difference between cloned and conventional products. The FDA said in January meat and milk from cloned cattle, swine and goats and their offspring were as safe to eat as products obtained from traditional animals. Before then, farmers and ranchers had followed a voluntary moratorium that prevented the sale of clones and their offspring. "It is theoretically possible" offspring from clones are in the...

Food and milk from the offspring of cloned animals may have entered the U.S. food supply, the U.S. government said on Tuesday, but it would be impossible to know because there is no difference between cloned and conventional products. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in January meat and milk from cloned cattle, swine and goats and their offspring were as safe as products from traditional animals. Before then, farmers and ranchers had followed a voluntary moratorium on the sale of clones and their offspring. While the FDA evaluated the safety of food from clones and their offspring, the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Making human-animal embryos for scientific experiments should be allowed because of the benefits to science and medicine, British experts said in a report released for Sunday. Such embryos should never, however, be implanted into either a woman or an animal, said the Academy of Medical Sciences. The combinations would include animal eggs and the nucleus, containing the genetic material, of a human being, or human embryos that carry the genetic material of an animal, the independent advisory body said. A cloning technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT for short, involves removing the nucleus from an...

The nation's biggest milk company, Dean Foods, said Thursday it will refuse milk from cloned cows. The Food and Drug Administration gave preliminary approval to meat and milk from cloned animals and could grant final approval by the end of the year. Federal scientists say there is virtually no difference between clones and conventional cows, pigs or goats. Smaller companies such as Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream and Organic Valley previously have said they oppose milk from clones. Dallas-based Dean Foods is a $10 billion company that owns Land OLakes and Horizon Organic, among dozens of other brands. In a...

LOS ANGELES -- A long-awaited study by US scientists has concluded that meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring are safe to eat and drink and should be allowed to enter the food supply without any special labeling. The finding is a strong signal that the Food and Drug Administration will endorse the use of cloning technology for cattle, goats, and pigs when it publishes a key safety assessment intended to clear the way for formal approval of the products. That assessment is expected this week. "All of the studies indicate that the composition of meat and milk...

Cloneburgers, anyone? Farmer can’t wait Facing eviction, dairyman considers breaking ban on cloned meat Updated: 7:21 p.m. ET Dec 19, 2006 WILLIAMSPORT, Md. - For nearly four years, dairy farmer Greg Wiles has poured milk from his cloned cows down the drain in compliance with a voluntary ban on food from cloned livestock. Now in financial straits, Wiles says he may be forced to sell his cloned cows for hamburger. The Food and Drug Administration says that’s probably safe, but pressure from the food industry has kept the agency from actually approving it. Milk and meat marketers worry that consumers...

A GUN-control group has called for a total ban on semi-automatic handguns to prevent them falling into criminal hands with deadly consequences. Speaking at the launch of a new national anti-handgun advertising campaign, National Coalition for Gun Control chair Sam Lee said the future looked bleak in relation to guns. "What we are going to see in the future is more high-powered handguns on the streets because gun manufacturers are developing what are called quick-draws, which means they can be quickly grabbed and aimed at someone," Ms Lee said. The campaign launch comes just days after the fatal drive-by shootings...

<p>There was news last week that scientists in South Korea have succeeded in cloning a human embryo. Their reported intent is to extract stem cells from the cloned embryos for research and therapeutic purposes, not to produce cloned babies. But if these accounts are accurate, the world is a large step closer to reproductive cloning. What would a world with human clones be like?</p>

Stem cells have been obtained from a cloned human embryo for the first time by scientists in South Korea. The breakthrough is being seen as a significant step towards growing patients' own replacement tissue to treat degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease. The team took genetic material from volunteer women and combined it with their eggs. The resulting embryo was then cultured to produce the cells. The experiment - the first published report of cloned human stem cells - means so-called therapeutic cloning is no longer a theory but a reality. Grow-your-own organs Supporters of medical cloning say it can...