Biotech company claims to have automated cloning with chip

from the brave-new-world? dept.
According to a press release (30 January 2002) issued by the UK-based New Scientist Magazine, a specialized chip that will automatically create hundreds of cloned embryos at a time is being developed by Aegen Biosciences, a Californian biotech company. If true, the chip should help make cloning cheap and easy enough for companies to mass-produce identical copies of the best milk or meat producing animals for farmers. It might even be used for cloning human embryos. According to the release, the chip automates the laborious process of nuclear transfer, the key step in cloning. At present it takes hours of painstaking work with a microscope to remove the nucleus of an egg cell and replace it by fusing the denucleated egg with another cell.