Can Older Cells Solve Cloning's Problems?

It goes against the current scientific conventional wisdom. But a suprising new study suggests that therapeutic cloning may be more successful using the most mature adult cells.

If there is one thing that people on both sides of the cloning debate agree upon, it's that cloning is an incredibly inefficient process. When it comes to cloning animals, like Dolly and Snuppy, the process produces a healthy animal only a dismal 1-5% of the time. This hit-or-miss dilemma wouldn't matter much if producing identical animals were its only application, but cloning is also the foundation for one of the more promising ways that stem cells might be used to treat human disease with a patient's own cells. At this rate, even cloning's most ardent supporters agree that such a method won't be very reliable � or very realistic. If therapeutic cloning, as it is known, is to become a viable treatment option, then the first thing scientists need to do is boost the cloning technique's efficiency.