THE ITALIAN WAY

  While in Europe  great astonishment and new laws to prevent human cloning are going on, the way Italy is following as regards the therapeutic cloning is meant to rise new doubts and maybe, at the light of first experiments, to solve all the ethical matters involved in cloning process. Indeed  the way the British Parliament is following suggested by Donaldson implies the use of embryos and that’s the reason why they’ve been attacked.

Italy has approved the TNSA method (nuclear transfer to produce stem cells of the same patient). The nucleus of an adult cell belonging to the patient is put in one oocyte previously enucleated. The nucleus has been reprogrammed. As a result of that what you get is not a zygote( a cell coming from the union of sexual cells) that is what an embryo comes from. What you have is a cell able to generate stem cells and to cap it all with the same genetical features of the patient (that’s decisive in order not to be rejected by the patient in case of transplant). The new stem cells fed  in laboratory may be led to recreate compatible organs needed by the patient. Moreover in the years to come it’s been already declared that there won’t be even the need of women oocytes replaced by artificial citoplasms. All this means leaving the hot stuff of embryos apart.

WHAT WILL IT ENABLE US TO DO ?

10 millions people could be helped by this method. The stem cells would be used to:

1)      rebuild spinal marrow and so give paraplegic hope to walk again.

2)      treat Alzheimer and Parkinson affected patients.

3)      rebuild heart tissue damaged by heart-attack.

And that would be just the beginning.............