This would eliminate the need for toxic drugs that suppress the immune system while the new tissue takes root. Geron picked up the technology with this in mind when it acquired Roslin Bio-Med in May 1999. Generally, a company might not want government regulators near such promising technology. But Geron is in a catch-22. Banning human cloning might somehow restrict its research, but public outrage at cloned people could stop it entirely.
Cloning is dangerous.
It involves sucking the genetic material from an egg cell and replacing it with the DNA-containing nucleus of an adult. Ideally, this produces a healthy genetic twin of the donor, but more often than not something goes wrong. The donor nucleus never quite believes that it's part of an embryo, and the animal's development goes haywire. This week, two cloned calves died because their underdeveloped immune systems did not protect them from disease. Cloning people is likely to be similarly disastrous.