A "milestone" breakthrough in human cloning has been revealed by scientists, who successfully used skin to generate embryonic cells.
Scientists in the United States said that could mean avoid using fertilised human embryos for stem cell therapies, stressing they had no interest in creating cloned humans, but the development is sure to spark renewed debate on the ethics of cloning human cells.
The "Brave New World" process the scientists have developed could also be used as a starting point for cloning humans. Human embryonic stem cells are normally derived from "unwanted" fertilised human embryos left over from IVF treatment, which raises ethical concerns.
It is the first time scientists have managed to create human embryos through cloning developed enough to provide stem cells.
In the new study, reported in the journal Cell, scientists transferred nuclei from human skin cells into human egg cells. The scientists used caffeine to keep the eggs stable during the procedure after it was shown to be effective in monkeys.
"The importance of the egg donor is again illustrated in this paper. Only high quality human eggs had the potential to reprogram somatic cells. It is remarkable that adding caffeine was the key that resulted in ES cell lines from all three donors. Professor Alison Murdoch, professor of reproductive medicine at Newcastle University told HuffPost UK.
The same somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) technique was employed by researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh to produce Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell.
Scientists have previously cloned monkey embryos and mined them for stem cells, but until now been frustrated in their attempts to do the same with humans.
Generally it has not proved possible to create human embryos that develop further than the eight cell stage - too early to yield stem cells.
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Human Cloning Breakthrough Hailed By Scientists