LETTERS Human Cloning Paul R. Gross (Letters, 14 Apr., p. 126) appears to have overlooked an important qualification in his assertion that "there is . . . no possibility that a literal copy of the donor individual can be produced by the insertion of a somatic nucleus into recipient cytoplasm of a con- conveniently available egg." He argues that the influence of the "maternal" messenger RNA present in the ovum prior to insertion of the donor nucleus would influence the development of the embryo, thereby precluding the creation of an identical copy. But what if the donor of the somatic nucleus were the same person as the source of the ovum? Here, the "maternal" messenger RNA would be transcribed from a nucleus virtually identical with the one to be inserted. It would seem then, that the potential for cloning identical copies is limited merely to those donors among us capable of producing ova. MITCHEL SAYARE Biological Sciences Group, University of Connecticut, Storr
Human Cloning Author(s): Mitchel Sayare Source: Science, New Series, Vol. 200, No. 4341 (May 5, 1978), p. 486 Published by: American Association for the Advancement of Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1746556 Accessed: 01-11-2017 16:29 UTC
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