Scientists at Stemagen, an obscure California biotechnology company, have suddenly become famous thanks to their claim that they’ve become the first to clone an adult human being.

The scientists claim that they took adult skin cells and inserted them into hollowed eggs, creating embryos that are the adult’s genetic twin. A similar claim proved fraudulent in 2005, so the scientific community is offering more reticent praise this time. Stemagen also failed to get stem cells from the cloned embryo – the whole point of human cloning – leading Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology to dismiss the news as “underwhelming.”

Scientists have cloned embryos before, but Dorinda Bordlee, senior counsel for the Bioethics Defense Fund, told WoW cloning an adult is more complicated. Embryonic cells are blank slates (called undifferentiated cells), so it is easier to insert the cells into an egg and grow an identical embryo. It is more difficult to take a differentiated cell, like an adult skin cell, and force it back into an undifferentiated state.

There are no federal laws against human cloning and the White House has banned federal funding for cloning. Others have poured millions into research, including Bill Gates, Harvard University, and the state of California. California’s Proposition 71 gives $3 billion to stem cell research.

Only six states have comprehensive bans on human cloning. Other states, like California and Connecticut, allow “therapeutic cloning” (cloning for research purposes) and ban “reproductive cloning” (cloning to initiate a pregnancy). This is supposed to ensure that scientists destroy each cloned embryo they create, but Bordlee notes that if a scientist implanted an embryo in the uterus of a willing woman, the state could do nothing to prevent the pregnancy.

Bordlee said human cloning leads to a “whole host of social and human rights problems.” She also said that scientists can now turn adult skin cells into stem cells without destroying embryos, a practice more successful than Stemagen’s and also ethically acceptable.

Two weeks after scientists announced that they could turn skin cells into stem cells without using human embryos, the debate over the implications heats up. Scientists and pundits take sides on the breakthrough’s scientific and ethical implications.

In the Washington Post, Alan I. Leshner and James A. Thomson (one of two scientists who developed the technique), cautioned against a quick rejection of embryonic stem cell research. They also said that conservatives can’t interpret the breakthrough as a vindication of George Bush’s restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, noting that the breakthrough “depended entirely on previous embryonic stem cell research.”

Wesley J. Smith, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, said Bush’s policy is just one reason scientists explored less controversial research. Ethics – not just politics or funding – played a role, and Smith said the Bush policy helped by focusing on “the moral importance of the embryo.” Thomson, one of the first scientists to isolate embryonic stem cells, has admitted his own ethical reservations about his research: “If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough. … I thought long and hard about whether I would do it.”

Smith said he believes the new technique will affect human cloning more than embryonic stem cell research, since it has given scientists something they believed possible only through cloning: “Tailor-made, patient-specific, pluripotent stem cells.” He predicts that President Bush’s stem cell research policy will stand through the rest of his term, and embryonic stem cell research will play a lesser part in the 2008 election. A California stem cell agency that spent millions on embryonic stem cell research is now funding research that does not harm human embryos.

But what do the world’s first cloners and stem cell researchers have to say? Ian Wilmut, the world’s first cloner, has rejected cloning research for Thomson’s new technique. And Thomson said the stem cell wars he helped begin will eventually end: “A decade from now, this will be just a funny historical footnote.”

Scientists have discovered how to turn adult human skin cells into stem cells and then into heart, brain and bone tissue, and they have done it without using human eggs or embryos.

Researchers at Kyoto University and the University of Wisconsin announced the advance today, and it has breathtaking implications for the future of medical research and the bioethics debate. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technologies, called the discovery “the holy grail. It’s like turning lead into gold.”

Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University first tested the technique – called somatic cell dedifferentiation – when he turned mice skin cells into stem cells last year. The same technique works with human cells. Scientists insert four genes into the skin cells, turning the cells into blank slates that they can then transform into other cell types like heart, brain and bone. Dr. James Thomson said in every test, the reprogrammed cells behaved just like human embryonic stem cells.

The technique has its drawbacks. As with embryonic stem cells, there is a risk that the cells will become cancerous, but scientists are optimistic that they can overcome this. The technique also has some marked advantages: Using a flake of skin is cheaper than using a fertilized human egg, the new cells are tailor-made for the donor, and the technique is not hampered by ethical controversy like human cloning or embryonic stem cell research. Wesley J. Smith, senior fellow of bioethics at Discovery Institute, told WoW the breakthrough undercuts the drive towards human cloning because it “gives scientists everything they said they wanted, without the moral baggage.”

The news comes days after Professor Ian Wilmut, scientific daddy to cloned sheep Dolly, turned his back on therapeutic human cloning and announced that he was pursuing research in the new technique, calling it not only more practical but also more socially acceptable.