Sooner or later it was going to happen.
Dr. Samuel Wood and his colleagues created embryo copies of themselves by placing their skin cells in a woman’s egg.
Although human embryos have been cloned before Dr. Wood’s embryos were the first to be made from cells taken from adult humans.
In this first attempt they survived for only five days.
Researchers from the Californian stem cell research company Stemagen employed the same technique used to make Dolly the sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal, to create the embryos.
They took eggs donated by young women having IVF and replaced genetic material with DNA from the skin cells of two men.
The eggs were then zapped with an electric current to induce fertilisation and the creation of embryos.
Some of the skin cells came from Dr Wood, Stemagen’s chief executive officer and a leading fertility specialist, while the others came from another member of staff.
The technique is seen as a vital step in the creation of cloned embryos rich in stem cells, which are “master cells” capable of becoming any type of body tissue.
Such stem cells could be invaluable in the study of diseases and the testing of drugs.
They could ultimately be used to replace the damaged tissues behind diseases from Alzheimer’s to diabetes.
Stem cells taken from cloned embryos would be a perfect match to the patient, whose body would not reject them.
Extracting stem cells from such embryos however leads to the death of the embryo.
Josephine Quintavalle, of the campaign group Comment On Reproductive Ethics, said: “Human cloning is unethical, unsafe, and completely unnecessary.
“It is time that scientists started to put some brakes on.”
Dr Calum MacKellar, of the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, said the creation and destruction of human embryos was “extremely offensive to millions in the UK”.
John Smeaton, of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said: “We have got scientists wandering around in an ethical wilderness, forgetting about matters of justice relating to our fellow human beings.
“We have people creating human beings with the intention of destroying them. That’s appalling.”
Critics fear the technology could be exploited by mavericks to clone babies and accused the scientists of reducing the miracle of human life to a factory of spare parts.
And the Vatican condemned the cloning of human embryos, calling it the “worst type of exploitation of the human being”.
“This ranks among the most morally illicit acts, ethically speaking,” said Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Vatican department that helps oversee the Church’s position on bioethics issues.
Stem cell experts gave the U.S. breakthrough, published in the journal Stem Cells, a cautious welcome.
Mr Smeaton said: “It is creating a category of beings regarded as sub-human who can be used as raw material to benefit other members of the human family.
“How wrong can something be before a scientist understands you cannot just do it because of the perceived good for human beings.”
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