Here We Clone Again!
Well, if we weren’t already, our sad species is officially fucked: a human has been cloned.
Scientists at biotech firm ACT in the U. S. took egg cells from female donors, evacuated their genetic material, and replaced the eggs’ genomes with DNA from regular tissue cells. This technique—called nuclear transfer—was the same used to clone Dolly the sheep.
But while Dolly managed to grow up and live a full and happy life, ACT’s human clones didn’t survive past the six-cell stage. Human embryos are considered to be self-sustaining—meaning they start expressing their own genes—between the six and eight-cell stage.
This is bad news for ACT scientists who want to grow human embryos and harvest stem cells from them. Stem cells can be turned into any kind of cell in the body, and ACT wants to use them to do everything from regenerating damaged kidneys to treating heart attack victims. Stem cells come of age much past the time that ACT’s clones survived until.
While laws exist in the U. S. that prevent publicly funded institutions from messing around with embryos, private companies can run wild. But Dubya, the Vatican and scientists from Germany and France have condemned the work as unethical.
Passin’ Alien Gas
Astronomers have sorted out the kinds of chemicals present in the atmosphere—of an alien planet more than 1,500-trillion kilometres away from Earth.
In a cosmological experiment, U. S. researchers used the Hubble telescope to gather light rays that pass through the atmosphere of the planet. When light passes through gases, the light waves interact with the gas particles, producing a pattern called a spectrum that is analysed by detectors. Gases made from different elements produce different spectral patterns. So far, only the element sodium has been detected. Even though the faraway planet is expected to have a surface temperature of 1100 degrees, the ability to measure the constituents of alien atmospheres is a good way, say researchers, to look for extraterrestrial life.
