IT'S SAFE to clone primates, including humans, but not mice, rats, sheep, cows, pigs and opossums, claim geneticists. They says there is a vital genetic difference separating the clonables from the unclonables.
"It lays to rest some of the technical worries about cloning," says Randy Jirtle of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. But other researchers say the claims are dangerous.
"The authors have allowed themselves to over-interpret their interesting results," says Ian Wilmut, creator of Dolly the sheep. "I hope that this will not be used to give encouragement to those who wish to clone humans."
Cloning often fails because of "large offspring syndrome", in which animals grow too big in the womb and often die at birth. Jirtle and his colleagues say this is because a gene called
In most mammals, including all those cloned so far, the paternal copy ...
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