A South Korean medical research team said yesterday it has succeeded in cultivating a human embryo using human cells in one of the first cloning experiments of its kind. Researchers at the infertility clinic of Kyunghee University Hospital in Seoul said they had cultivated a human embryo in its early stages using an unfertilised egg and a somatic cell - those which make up most of the body - donated by a woman in her 30s.
Dr Lee Bo-yon, a researcher with the hospital's infertility clinic, said the human embryo in the Kyunghee University experiment was last seen dividing into four cells before the operation was aborted. "If implanted into a uterine wall of a carrier, we can assume that a human child would be formed and that it would have the same gene characteristics as that of the donor."