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'All claims on human cloning spurious'

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE APRIL 17. Alan Colman, one of the creators of the first cloned sheep, Dolly, has said that all claims of successful human cloning to date are spurious.

The Raileans, members of a sect that believes that humans were cloned from an extra terrestrial being, were "charlatans without any scientific expertise", he said here today. Some time ago, the sect claimed it had successfully cloned a human.

Addressing at a conference as part of Bio 2003, Dr. Colman said even attempts with monkeys had so far failed. He had now "moved on" to research on stem cells as Chief Scientific Officer, Embryonic Stem Cell International, a Singapore-based company.

The prime motive for cloning, he said, was the commercial application of xenotransplantation, by modifying and knocking out genes to create organs that would reduce the "immune gap" between one individual and another, or even between animals and humans, after transplantation.

For example, there was a coating of a sugar called Alpha 13 Galactose, on the organs of a pig, some of which have been used to replace human ones that were no longer working. The sugar is not present in organs of higher primates such as humans. So, the idea was to knock out the gene responsible for that coating so that the organ would be less likely to be rejected at least for that one reason. Such pigs had been created,

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