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A team of Korean and Japanese scientists created "a mouse without a father" through virgin birth. Micorgen, a Korean bio-engineering company (president: Seo jeong-sun), announced that it succeeded in creating a mouse with a team of Japanese scientists, led by Prof. Tomohiro Kono, from the Tokyo University of Agriculture. They did so through parthenogenesis -- also known as virgin birth -- where babies are born without the eggs being fertilized.
The research was published in the globally-known scientific journal ¡®Nature¡¯ on Thursday. It had been believed that a mammal cannot be created through virgin birth. The research team chemically removed gene h19, which is believed to prevent virgin births, from an egg of a mouse and fertilized it with a normal egg.
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"The mouse without a father" and its babies created jointly by a Japanese and Korean research team without using sperm. / courteousy of Macrogen
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The team said that they transplanted 343 fertilized eggs into 26 surrogate mother mice. Eight of them were born and two survived. Prof. Kono¡¯s team led the research, with five members of his team included in the 7 authors of the paper. Microgen provided the DNA chip technology used to analyze the genes of the mouse.
This is expected to cause controversy, however, because the technique can be used to produce other mammals like humans. With regard to this, Prof. Kono said in an interview with AP that it is senseless to think of applying the technique to humans.
(Pack Seoung-jae, whitesj@chosun.com )
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