What does human cloning have to do with embryonic stem cell research?
In 1995 a sheep was successfully cloned and named "Dolly." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_the_sheep) Since then, some scientists believe that humans, too, can be cloned. By cloning human embryos, scientists could theoretically produce human embryos that would be genetically identical to the donors who supplied the genetic information for the new cloned human being.
Theoretically, there is a medical advantage to this approach over using foreign in vitro fertilized embryos which have immuno rejection problems.
Example: John Doe, at 40 years old, has an accident and suffers a spinal cord injury. His doctor removes a skin cell from John and removes the genetic information from that skin cell (The nucleus from his skin cell) and inserts it into an oocyte or female egg that has been emptied of its genetic material. This process creates a copy of Joe - an identical twin of himself, but 40 years and 9 months younger - Joe's identical twin brother as a human embryo. This embryo clone of Joe is allowed to grow for 5-7 days until he develops stem cells. Those stem cells are fatally extracted and then injected into Joe's spinal cord which then begin to regenerate and repair Joe's spinal cord.
At least that is the theory. But to date, no scientist has been able to actually clone a human being. The much touted experiments of Dr. Hwang Woo-suk's of Seoul, South Korea have been shown by the investigative panel of Seoul National University to be fraudulent.
Hwang's team did not have the data for the stem cell lines in the 2004 paper, but fabricated it," Chung Myung-hee, the head of the panel, said. "We concluded that Professor Hwang's team did not have patient-specific stem cell lines and did not have any scientific basis that the team made them" said Myung-hee. (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/29/science/29clone.ready.html?pagewanted=all)
