Scientists with lots of money and nothing better to do than to open Pandora’s Box of social and political problems have moved a major step closer to cloning human beings.

Research published in the journal Cell says the Oregon Health & Science University team used the same sort of process used in creating Dolly the Sheep almost 20 years ago. 

“This is a huge scientific advance,” said Dr. George Daley, a Harvard stem cell scientist who wasn't involved in the work, “But it's going to, I think, raise the specter of controversy again.”

They took adult human skin cells and turned them into an embryo, developing it as far as the blastocyst stage, which is around 150 cells.  That is enough to provide a source of embryonic stem cells that can make new heart muscle, bone, brain tissue or any other type of cell in the body.

Sounds great so far, right?  Well, then the embryo is destroyed. 

“This is a case in which one is deliberately setting out to create a human being for the sole purpose of destroying that human being,” says Dr. Daniel Sulmasy, a professor of medicine and a bioethicist at the University of Chicago.

And then there are those scientists who might want to take the research another step that the original team would not take.

“This raises serious problems because it is the first actual human cloning,” Sulmasy says. “We already know there are people out there who are itching to be able to be the first to bring a cloned human being to birth.  And I think it's going to happen.”