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The academic world has hailed the success of a team led by Prof. Hwang Woo-suk of Seoul National University in cloning stem cells that match patients, with some calling them "outstanding¡± and ¡°epochal."
The New York Times, quoting Prof. Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh, who worked with the team,
said the academic world was taking the results as a major development, while the Wall Street Journal, quoting Lorenz Studer of the New York Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, said the results mobilized all therapeutic cloning techniques and were nothing short of epochal.
Schatten told the BBC the results were more significant than the discovery of vaccines and antibiotics and would rival the Industrial Revolution, and the Financial Times agreed there could be no doubt that Korea was making key contributions to world research efforts in therapeutic cloning.
In an interview with The Times (UK), Leonard Zon, a Harvard researcher and president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, said tremendous progress had been made, and that while more research would be necessary for the cells to be used in treating diseases, Hwang's success provided a turning point in scientists¡¯ approach to the goal.
Japan¡¯s Asahi Shimbun reported Hwang's results on its front page, saying Korea was leading the world in the highly competitive sector of regenerative treatment. Prof. Norio Nakatsuji of Kyoto University, the first Japanese to extract a stem cell, said Hwang's results were doubtless surprising and gave him the feeling that a fundamental step was close to completion.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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