Transplant Triumph: Cloned cow kidneys thrive for months
By John Travis
On the eve of a U.S. Senate vote that could ban similar experiments in people, scientists have successfully transplanted into cows miniature kidneys and other tissues generated through cloning. The experiments offer the most convincing indication yet that the controversial transplant strategy called therapeutic cloning can produce genetically matched cells that a person’s immune system won’t reject as foreign.
“This shows that [therapeutic cloning] really does work. That could help shape the debate in Congress,” says Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass. He and his colleagues describe their new results in the July Nature Biotechnology.