Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery

Cloning advocates have touted this type of science as therapeutic cloning. This is different from reproductive cloning since therapeutic cloning deals with embryos only. If you wanted to keep living, doctors obviously couldn't remove your heart and clone a new one. Cloning yourself in order to use the clone's organs wouldn't fly either. Here's where stem cells come in, along with recent scientific breakthroughs that sidestep cloning altogether. Scientists could potentially clone organs with SCNT by cloning embryos, extracting the stem cells from the blastocyst, and stimulating the stem cells to differentiate into the desired organ. Xenotransplantation, or transplanting animal organs into humans, has also been examined as a potential source for organ transplants. But if our bodies sometimes reject transplanted organs from other humans, how would they react to animal organs? Future stem cell development for growing replacement organs may not even require cloning.