Interview with Dr. Samuel Wood

I have been very close to my mother all my life .. She is an outstanding journalist, writer and great woman. Sadly, Shen suffered from complications related to diabetes. It was absolutely terrible for me when she lost her sight and most of her walking ability. She died from a fall seven or eight years ago. At her funeral, I vowed that one day I would do something for her situation.

A few years later, I read about Korean research on stem cells. In 2004 and 2005, Huang Yuxi fraudulently reported that he had successfully produced human embryonic stem cells by cloning. I didn't know it was a scam at that time, so it was very exciting to think that a long list of diseases could be treated.

Together with another gentleman, I found the stem cell research company Stemagen, whose father hand died of ALS. One night we went out for a drink and we started talking about our parents. We want to do something meaningful for them.

Is it good or bad?

At the moment when we decided to start Stemagen, I read all the information I could about the past cloning efforts. Dolly the cloned sheep in 1997 is very interesting, but at that stage, people did not pay attention to the cloned stem cells; They focus on the reproductive possibilities of cloning.

From the medical and scientific point of view, human reproductive cloning is completely wrong in ethics, even ignoring any religious issues related to it. The reason is that most reproductive clones of other species are actually abnormal, the abortion rate is very high, the stillbirth rate is very high, the fetus is deformed and dies shortly after birth, and so on.

It is absolutely wrong to take a person away and let them experience something that may bring great pain, but there is no good result. Even if people can adopt the technology we developed and start to do it (or even do it successfully), we hope they won't.

On the other hand, therapeutic cloning does not involve any risk of human life, and actually provides great potential for alleviating the suffering of real human beings who are experiencing some terrible things.

To some extent, I am a pure scientist, and I know that many different studies or discoveries may be used for evil. As scientists, our job is to make the best use of this technology and let as many other scientists as possible use this technology to help us do good things. For a scientist, there is really no effective way to stop others from using their knowledge for things they shouldn't do.

We need to be honest with the technology we use. They need to be copied by others, s9, and we are providing a road map. I hope that the existing legislation and the strong public opposition caused by any attempt to clone human beings can prevent anyone from embarking on this path.

What did they say? There is not a technology that has not been used for some evil purposes, and some people will try to carry out human reproductive cloning. I think this is inevitable, and it is almost impossible to eliminate it through legislation.

The cause of fame

I was said to be the first person to "clone myself". There are different types of cloning. At the cellular level, yes, I was the first person to clone myself. We have thought a lot about how to deal with whose cells we should use and whether we should let the world and the scientific community know who the first cell clone was. Finally, we decided to add the human side to the cloning.

I didn't expect it to cause the first controversy, but I am still glad that we have embarked on this road. We received emails and phone calls from thousands of people in need.

I think that by moving forward and putting it on the face, we made it very real, and now people all over the world know that cloning is here. I believe it will be used for treatment soon, so I think our goal has been achieved.

pure science

The thing is, a woman with informed consent donated an egg, and we took out her genetic material from the egg. Then we put a skin cell into the egg.

We are really interested in creating stem cell lines for specific diseases and specific people. The process of extracting cells from a person does not take more than a minute or two. For example, you can take some skin cells from your arm, and in a minute or two, you can get the cells you need to complete this process.

This process enables us to study the causes of specific diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, ALS or Parkinson's disease, and then study various treatments for these diseases. If stem cell lines are produced for any given individual and then transplanted back to that individual, they will not be rejected by that individual.

Sweet success

I always think that when our research is successful, I will be glad that we have finished this research, while others have not. In fact, it is transcendental-when you look through a miniature telescope, you may see what it looked like a long time ago, at least in part.

Tears welled up in my eyes when I looked down at the cloned blastocyst. I did this for my mother, and I realized that if she could live a few more years, maybe we could use this technology to help her. It is exciting to see the potential that she has never had a chance to experience.

There is a big misunderstanding that we decided to destroy these embryos for some reason. Because of scientific fraud in the past, there are so many doubts about this process that there is no doubt that it is crucial that they are clones.

During the analysis, the embryos were destroyed as necessary. In other words, to get genetic material from inside the cell for analysis, you must destroy the cell. We hope to avoid destroying them.

Now we are trying our best to create stem cell lines, and people are paying attention to them with great interest.

The Pope and the President

There are many people who are against our work.

We were condemned by the Vatican and mentioned negatively in President Bush's State of the Union address. In a sense, this is an honor, because it is the way for us to do something meaningful. It is not every day that you are condemned by the Vatican and President Bush in the same week.

There is usually no dialogue between researchers and opponents in the field of embryonic stem cells.

This is such an emotional and controversial topic that it makes no sense to me. Logically, this is not life. I agree that this is a potential life, but most embryos never become life. Most of them are born and die without implantation. The fetus is a life. This argument makes sense to me, but it makes no sense for me to observe an embryo in the laboratory and give it all the rights of human life.