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This is the sixth-floor lab in Building No. 85 at Seoul National University, the center of operations for Woo Suk Hwang, the South Korean scientist who made headlines last week when he announced that his team, using Dolly-the-sheep techniques, had created 11 human stem-cell lines perfectly matched to the DNA of human patients--a giant leap beyond anything any other lab has achieved. The eggs hollowed out in Building No. 85 were fused with skin cells taken from nearly a dozen patients--ages 2 to 56, suffering from a variety of injuries and disorders--and grown...
Many scientists were astonished by how far the South Koreans had come. Only 15 months ago, Hwang's group created a stir as the first--and so far the only--lab to generate human stem cells via SCNT. Back then it had to use 242 eggs before it was able to create a single, viable set of stem cells from a healthy woman. This time it was able to create 11 stem-cell lines using an average 17 eggs each. "The efficiency is exceptionally high--much higher than I would have thought possible," says Doug Melton, a stem-cell researcher...
...differences in regulatory environments alone don't explain the South Koreans' success, as TIME's visits to Hwang's lab in early May and again last week made clear. The laboratory is a whirlwind of purposeful activity, and nobody is busier or more focused than Hwang, its director...
...example, whereas Hwang's assistants gently squeeze the nuclei from eggs donated by female volunteers, researchers at other labs use a microaspirator to suck out the contents, which Hwang believes may damage the eggs unnecessarily. "Professor Hwang jokes that we're good at manipulating the egg this way because we can use chopsticks," says Okjae Koo, one of the graduate students in the lab...
With summer housing centralized, the University will be better able to provide undergraduates—especially women—safe transportation to and from lab sites in Longwood and the North Yard, according to the report...