Fertility clinics typically pay women $ 5,000 or more to
donate their egg cells, in a procedure that is time - consuming, medically arduous, and not without health risks.
Women would have to
donate these egg cells, requiring a risky medical procedure that does not benefit them or their own health.
Not exact matches
One donor gave eight
eggs, of which four yielded colonies of hESCs, suggesting several colonies could be made from each set of
donated eggs (
Cell, DOI: 10.1016 / j.
cell.2013.05.006).
Hwang claimed to have perfected somatic
cell nuclear transplant, a procedure in which genetic material is removed from a
donated egg and replaced with DNA from the patient to create cloned
cells that could regenerate diseased tissues or organs.
The problem, he believes, is that Harvard Stem
Cell Institute researchers, following ethics guidelines, decided not to pay women to
donate their
eggs for research.
After nearly a year of recruitment efforts, not a single woman consented to
donate her
eggs for stem
cell research.
Daley says his group hopes to acquire
donated eggs from women with inherited diseases and use parthenogenesis to create
cell lines to study those disorders.
If the
cells can be fertilized and develop into viable embryos, and if human ES
cells turn out to have similar powers, such
cells could allow researchers to get around some of the expense and ethical questions that arise from using
donated eggs for therapeutic cloning experiments.
A study in this week's Nature Genetics shows that the DNA in Dolly's mitochondria — the
cells» power plants — is not from her genetic mother, but from her second «parent,» the sheep that
donated the «empty»
egg cell.
Hyun wrote a 2006 commentary piece in Nature in which he argued that just like others who volunteer for research, women should be paid to
donate eggs for stem
cell studies.
The fact that these ordinary patients are prepared to
donate their own unused
eggs towards this research is an example of the high level of public support for medical stem
cell research.