A groundbreaking study on stem cell research that could one day provide a cure for debilitating illnesses was funded with less than $200,000 a year in largely government grants, a South Korean scientist said on Friday. Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul National University and his South Korean team announced on Thursday that they had successfully created batches of embryonic stem cells from patients. Their study fulfils one of the basic promises of using cloning technology in stem cell research - that a piece of skin could be taken from a patient and used to grow the cells.
Researchers believe the cells could be trained to provide tailored tissue and transplant organs to cure juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's disease and even to repair severed spinal cords.
Hwang said that about $2 million in funds available to him this year is shared by 20 teams conducting various research projects under his supervision.
"The cost that actually went into stem cell research would be about a tenth of the amount," he told reporters after arriving home from London.
The cost was equivalent to about one hundredth of the funds that scientists in the United States work with on similar projects, said Park Ky-young, South Korea's presidential adviser for information, science and technology.
Hwang said his team would begin looking at opportunities in international co-operation to fund his study but it could pose further ethical challenges.
Ethical concerns are constantly in the minds of the researchers as they tread unknown territory, Hwang said. "I know there is a controversy over the ethical issue. But there's no right answer to this," he said.
"The ethical review took three times longer period than the scientific review. We've gone through a very thorough review which made us want to drop the research at one point."
Hwang and his team had said earlier that their method might be less controversial than other work with embryonic stem cells because, by definition, a human embryo was never actually created.
The report of the team's study, published in the journal Science, is certain to add to the growing US political controversy over federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
Hwang said his method differed from that first used to derive human embryonic stem cells in 1998.
"I think this construct is not an embryo," he said. "There is no fertilisation in our process. We use nuclear transfer technology. I can say this result is not an embryo but a nuclear transfer construct."
Dolly the sheep, the first adult mammal cloned, was made using nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus is removed from an egg cell, replaced with the nucleus of the animal or person to be cloned and then fused. The egg begins dividing as if it had been fertilised and sometimes becomes an embryo.
Hwang said it was difficult to assess how far they had to advance to realise the dream of providing a cure for debilitating illnesses and injuries. "Let's say there's a cosy room. For you to get there, you have to open a few doors shut tight. I opened the first door last year. And I opened four more doors this year. I see several more left to get to the room."
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