How to Build a Human (2011) s01e01 Episode Script
Creation
We are setting out on a fantastic voyage.
A journey into inner-space.
Into the world of ourselves.
Because this is where our future lies, inside each one of us.
Never before could we navigate this microscopic universe, or view it so clearly.
At the heart of each cell is DNA, the substance that builds every living creature on this planet.
And now, for the first time in history, not only can we read our own DNA, but we can manipulate it.
The future is here.
Now.
It promises to rebuild broken lives.
Cells will be engineered to grow new organs.
It heralds a brave, new world of prediction.
Super-humans with unhuman abilities.
The hope of extended lives.
A true elixir of youth.
This is the eighth day of creation, as we explore how to build a human.
In the beginning was the cell, and all life was single celled.
And the cells multiplied - by cloning.
By creating identical copies.
For billions of years this was the way life reproduced.
Clones ruled the world.
Mindless and immortal.
Then, under water, sex evolved.
Sperm met egg.
The mingling of genes sparked an explosion of life.
Millions of new species.
And this potent mix of sex and chance ultimately led to us.
It's taken millions of years for blind chance to turn us from primitive humans into modern man.
But now we are taking charge.
Biologists are learning how to clone, and they are mixing genes to create new species.
But above all, they are becoming masters of the molecules they study.
We are at a turning point in history, and the potential impact of this work excites leaders in the field like Princeton's Lee Silver.
Now, as we enter the 21st Century, it is perfectly clear that we are going to understand what it means to be human at the smallest level.
We're going to be able to pick apart human cells and not only are we going to be able to understand it, we're going to be able to manipulate human beings, we're going to be able to change our genes, change our cells, change human beings in every kind of way that you can imagine.
Paul Nurse, winner of a Nobel Prize for his work on cell division, is well aware that the growing ability to manipulate DNA worries other people.
We can now do things that people couldn't imagine before.
And it really gets to the central core about what is a human being.
And I honestly think that many, many people are uncomfortable with the sorts of things that biologists and doctors can do.
Some of the most exciting and controversial work in modern biology is going on inside this building.
In here, they're about to attempt something that has never been done before, to clone a human embryo.
Doctor Jose Cibelli is working late, because tomorrow morning he will start an extraordinary experiment.
Jose's dream is to develop new ways to repair damaged humans, and he plans to do it by cloning.
I dream about this for a long time, to the point that I think it's an obsession for me, because if we can actually fulfill this dream, you can change the life of so many people, and that's why I'm obsessed with it.
I mean it's a privilege for me to be here, and I can't wait to get it done.
Jose wants to use cloning to repair people.
Not to create new people.
But though it's for medical purposes there is fierce opposition to this research.
They are afraid of this new technology because they or perhaps they have a misconception that this is that we're creating a human being when, in fact, we¡¯re just reconstructing a small group of cells.
For years Jose and his company have been cloning animals.
In 1998 they cloned the first cow.
They also cloned a rare ox called a Gower.
Now, Jose will use his skills on another species he will try to grow an early human embryo.
If he succeeds, his name will go down in history.
Until now, there's only been one way to create human embryos with egg and sperm.
Sara Waddington got pregnant the conventional way.
But even so, nature had a surprise for her.
Sara is having identical triplets.
Nature's clones.
I picked Carl up from work and he said, did you do anything interesting at work today.
And I said, no, not really.
Ch, I found out I was pregnant, but that's about it.
And he just went, you are joking? I said, no.
Sara got pregnant at almost the first attempt.
Millions of Carl's sperm travelled to Sara's waiting egg.
Just one burrowed in.
At that moment, a unique embryo was created.
But then something very strange happened.
For reasons no one understands, Sara's embryo cloned itself.
It split into two, then into three to form identical triplets.
We'd always wanted a family.
Sara wants a bigger family than I do.
I'm sort of in the middle.
But you know, we - you know, we wanted a few kids running about.
It's going to be quite good.
We just didn't expect them all to come at once.
Six months into her pregnancy Sara has a scan.
It's a chance to see how the triplets are developing.
So one, with the body round here; two, the head here and the body coming up here.
Twin three, the head here and the body's coming round there.
For the first time they're able to see a three-dimensional image of the triplets.
Now the face is coming through.
I can see that now.
The little nose, the lips, and you see the eye there.
There's a little bit of cord just over this eye here.
Professor Campbell has confirmed that Sara and Carl's triplets are boys.
You took it quite badly.
You were really shocked, weren't you? Well And it didn¡¯t just it didn't bother me at all.
It didn't bother you, but you do want a girl.
Mmm.
And you still want a girl is the point.
That's what bothers him, the fact that we might have to do it again.
Sara will give birth to identical triplets within two months.
Nature is practised at making human clones, so the odds are high of a successful outcome.
Doctor Jose Cibelli however, is going into unknown territory with his experiments.
To clone a human embryo Jose first needs human eggs.
A human egg like this.
Barely visible to the naked eye.
It could easily fit onto the tip of a pin.
Unlike the cow or bovine eggs Jose practices with, human eggs are in extremely short supply.
Tomorrow he'll work with some for the first time.
I have access to hundreds and hundreds of bovine eggs, every day.
Human eggs is completely different.
You have only perhaps tomorrow we're going to get only, we can get anywhere from zero to twenty.
And each one of them has to survive.
I cannot afford to kill one of them.
When Jose gets eggs, he will start to clone the genes of a man, a man who lives in Texas.
This man - Judson Somerville.
Judson is a doctor.
He's married with two children.
He loves sport.
He's run, biked and swum in several triathlons.
His life could be described as perfect, except for one thing.
In 1990, when he was 29, he broke his back in an accident.
In a sense it's like being a prisoner.
I'm not in a jail cell, I can get out, you know, I have freedoms that a prisoner doesn't.
But I am a prisoner of my own body.
Before his injury, Judson was an athletic six-footer.
I was a very big, strong guy.
And now I'm four foot eight in a wheelchair.
It's, you know, it's a difference, it is a difference.
I was on a bicycle ride with three other doctors, and I was coming down the mountain, and coming at a pretty good clip, and at the base there was a hair-pin turn, I naturally put on my brakes, the tyre separated and I ended up crashing.
This X-ray shows Judson's spine today.
Steel pins support the shattered bone.
The real harm though, is to his spinal cord, which has been completely severed.
Judson believes Jose's cloning work offers him hope.
If I could walk and hike and ride my bike and, you know, live a normal life like this was just a bad dream that went away, that would be fabulous.
Judson needs to grow new spinal tissue.
But how? It's not possible for an adult.
But there was a time when we could all do this amazing feat.
When we were embryos.
An embryo is made up of cells that can turn into the different cells and tissues of the human body, so an embryo has to make a heart, it has to make a liver and it has to make a brain.
That's nature's way of making a human being.
The secret ingredient that gives an embryo its power to grow and develop is a mysterious cell called an embryonic stem cell.
They first appear about a week after fertilisation.
At this point the embryo is just a small clump of cells.
Among them are a few stem cells.
Here, magnified 15,000 times, are human stem cells.
They are unique.
They alone can transform themselves into any kind of human cell.
A nerve cell, for example.
As it divides it will build a brain and spinal tissue.
Cr a heart cell.
Eventually, multiplying enough times to construct a whole heart.
Doctor Tony Atala is fascinated by the potential of stem cells.
He sees many children whose bodies are ravaged by disease, children who could benefit from stem cell technology.
In his lab he's growing new body parts and testing them on animals.
Let's say that a patient needs a windpipe, we can take a small biopsy from that patient, grow the cells outside of the body, and then seed them onto a mould in the shape of a windpipe, and then it creates a windpipe tissue which we're able to implant back into the patient.
And in fact, what you're seeing here is a windpipe which is the size that would be used in a human.
He's already built blood vessels.
And created a kidney using rat stem cells.
Here, we have a much more complex structure, a kidney, and this is a miniature kidney, but when implanted experimentally, we can actually see it make urine.
And hopefully, in 10 years, this technology would be available for patients with kidney failure.
Any type of tissue can be grown in this way.
Even spinal tissue.
Regrowing Judson's spinal cord, even partially, could transform his life.
The spinal cord's very complicated.
However, if I could even get a little more function it would make it easier for me.
I try to keep a stiff upper-lip as they say, but there's a lot of things that are very frustrating.
Getting around, getting in and out of my car, getting in and out of bed, getting in the shower, getting onto the toilet, you know.
Once I get to bed it's just like I made it, I made it one more day.
Stem cells offer the hope of doing what his own body cannot.
Like Judson, this rat has a severed spine.
Its legs are paralysed.
To treat it, doctors twisted fibres into the shape of spinal cord, seeded them with stem cells and implanted them into the rat's back.
Stimulated by a molecular signal, the stem cells started to grow, forming new spinal tissue.
The results surpassed all expectations.
When we started this project we were hoping to see any sign of neurological recovery, such as movement of a toe maybe, is what our initial hope was.
And this was just completely unexpected.
The effects of stem cell therapy were dramatic.
Although still weak, the rat's legs are moving.
Messages from the brain are getting through.
Post-mortems carried out on other rats show how well the spinal cord had regrown.
So rat stem cells can patch up a rat's spine.
But to fix his spine, Judson would need human stem cells, preferably stem cells that won't be rejected by his body.
Cells that match his own DNA.
Judson needs stem cells cloned from his own body.
To get stem cells what you really need is an embryo of the patient that we're trying to treat.
And the only way we can do that is by cloning, that is by taking one of the cells of the patient, putting it into an egg - a human egg, and then allowing that egg to turn into an embryo and produce the stem cells that we need.
And it's by this cloning process that we can generate cells that won't be rejected by the patient's body.
And this is why Jose is preparing to clone cells from Judson.
He passionately believes that this process called Therapeutic Cloning could transform the lives of many people.
A recent survey is saying that about 120 million people can potentially benefit from this therapy, so this is a revolution in medicine.
And such a revolution could impact on all our lives.
Imagine, you're driving home.
Your kidneys, liver, heart all damaged beyond repair.
While you're on life support plans for growing replacement parts can begin.
Using cloned stem cells doctors will grow spare parts that are exact doubles of the originals.
But this vision of the future depends on creating cloned human embryos, something no one has ever done before.
Jose Cibelli, however, is going to try.
The BBC have been given exclusive access to follow the whole procedure.
First of all, Jose needs human eggs.
He waits outside while they're collected from an anonymous donor at a nearby clinic.
Human eggs are so hard to obtain that, initially, Jose's wife volunteered to donate hers.
This is a difficult procedure.
My wife wanted to do it, and she partially started to be stimulated and then had to be stopped.
She's not the right age.
So I am very, very thankful for this woman that is going to help us get the research done.
A security guard is with Jose to ensure the eggs don't go astray.
Human eggs are precious, because a woman's ovaries normally produce just one egg every month.
But under the influence of hormone injections a woman's body can produce up to twenty eggs at a time.
As with infertility treatments, the eggs are collected under local an aesthetic.
Afterwards, the eggs are carefully counted and inspected.
Each egg is less than a tenth of a millimetre wide.
So Jose, do you know how many? We got seven.
Seven.
So that's good.
They predicted east night, I didn't get the message, but they predicted eight.
So they got seven.
That's pretty good.
These eggs could mark the start of a new era in medicine.
The quest to repair people by cloning.
You see, I - I don't want to think about it until we actually see the cells growing, I don't want to think about it.
And when it's time to celebrate, we'll celebrate.
Arriving safely back at HQ the security guard still accompanies Jose down to his lab.
The eggs will remain under lock and key.
Jose now faces the greatest challenge of his life.
He will use these eggs to try to create the first few cells of an embryo of Judson.
To do this, Jose needs one more vital ingredient - Judson's own cells.
I took a small cutter similar to the straw, and then with a circular twisting motion bored down through the skin to pull the biopsy out, and when I pulled it out, the bit of tissue stays inside of the cutter.
Fortunately, I don't have any sensation so it doesn't hurt, but it certainly looks pretty horrible when you're doing it.
This is a vial that contains several thousands of cells from the skin of Jud.
So what I'm going to do today, I'm going to take one of these cells, just one, and inject it into an egg.
Judson's skill cell, like almost every other cell in his body, contains all the genetic information needed to build another Judson.
No skin cell is visible to the naked eye.
But enlarged 60,000 times the breathtaking interior world of the cell bursts into view.
At the heart of the cell lies the nucleus.
Protected inside the nucleus are chromosomes.
Chromosomes are nothing more than tightly bound packages of DNA.
When they're unravelled, the characteristic double-strands of DNA are revealed.
Each strand of DNA carried hundreds of genes.
And it's these genes that build everything, from the shape of your nose to the colour of your skin.
Jose will insert the nucleus containing Judson's DNA into a human egg.
Doing this should turn the adult skin cell back into its early embryonic form.
But how it does this is a mystery.
We know the magic is in the egg.
Now, how it works, we don't know, and we keep saying that the person that can find that out should be given the Nobel Prize.
First, Jose has to remove the glowing nucleus out of the tiny egg.
This nucleus contains the genetic material of the woman who donated this egg.
It cannot be mixed with Judson's DNA or a hybrid would result.
Now, Jose is ready to collect one of Judson's skin cells.
I'm trying to load the cell inside the pipette.
Okay, the cell is inside the pipette.
I'm going to go and I'm going to go and grab an egg and inject the cell in.
Finally, Jose is ready to begin.
So I'm ready to inject one of these cells into the egg for the first time.
So anything could happen.
It could be that we end up killing the egg without even doing anything.
So I'm very nervous, and my heart is pumping, so I'd better stop talking.
Jose is about to cross an entirely new frontier.
So I just went through the zone, and now I'm gonna go try to pierce the membrane, I'll be very gentle.
One stroke should be enough, I guess.
For the first time in history we are seeing instead of a sperm, a cell containing the complete genetic make up of a human go into a human egg.
And now I'm going to go backward very slowly.
The first egg now has Judson's skin cell inside it.
Jose then injects the remaining eggs with skin cells.
He will use chemicals to shock each egg into behaving as if it had been fertilised.
If it works they will divide.
The egg's still waiting for a sperm.
If we don't do anything they are just going to sit there.
So we are going to let it sit there for about two hours, and then we're going to trigger development artificially, without sperm.
If these eggs divide we will be a step closer to the age of truly personalised medicine.
And stem cells will have wider usage than just building body parts.
They could also provide treatments for diseases like diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
Ultimately, perhaps, they could be used to replace older cells.
Delaying the ageing process.
But these dreams lie in the future.
For now, Jose has to wait.
It will be two days before he knows if the eggs have divided.
Jose is trying to grow an embryo for stem cells.
Even advocates of such research are aware that many people will find this unacceptable.
These advances in modern medicine and biology are really getting to the core of what life is, and that makes many people very uncomfortable.
So taking an embryo and using the cells is something that many people think is murder.
Others think that murder is a strange term to apply to a group of cells so small they could fit on the tip of a pin.
All you have at the beginning for the first two weeks, is a mass of cells, and when you want to make embryonic stem cells what you're doing is taking cells from this initial embryo, which is just a mass of cells.
So it is alive in the sense that, yes, it's a human life, but it's not alive in the sense of being conscious.
And I think there's quite a difference between conscious life and cellular life.
At the moment, human embryos are the best source of stem cells.
Until new sources of stem cells are found the debate about their use will continue.
Jose Cibelli is about to discover if the eggs have divided or cleaved.
We'll be very, very lucky if we get development today, because this is the first try, and usually the first try doesn't work.
So I'm trying to be mentally prepared for not seeing them cleave.
If the eggs have divided while in this incubator, Jose will have produced the first few cells of Judson Somerville's clone.
No, there's no cleavage, there's no cleavage.
They are - basically they are rested, as a one cell.
So they're alive, some of them are alive, but they haven't cleaved.
So this time it didn't work.
We'll have to try it again.
Very disappointed.
I'll have to try it again.
I guess they said that we haven't failed if we keep trying, so we're going to keep trying.
There are those who will be glad that Jose has failed.
For one of the main fears about this technology is that it will not stop at cloning stem cells.
Going from cloning a few cells to cloning a child would be a huge leap.
But there will be demand, in some cases, hard to resist.
There are certain human situations where one has lots of sympathy for the people involved.
An example would be where parents have a child who has died or dying, and they might be tempted to think about reproductive cloning.
So that they could somehow bring that child back to life.
My own personal view is that I really don't think that's a good idea, I really don't.
Human cells live on for a few hours after death, so cloning the dead is theoretically possible.
But if you really wanted to replace a child, it would be better to take cells from the living, before they die.
James McErlain sees cloning as a future option for his child.
My little boy, Jamie, is seven years of age, and he's physically perfect, a beautiful body, beautiful limbs.
He - unfortunately, he mightn't live until he's ten.
Jamie is severely brain damaged.
He has only peripheral vision; he cannot talk, and he has no control over any of his muscles.
He has the mental ability of a baby.
He's been in comas several times.
He requires his parents' care 24 hours a day.
They believe that while he was in the womb Jamie's brain was perfect, that his genes built a normal baby.
However, Jamie's birth was difficult.
Soon after, he seemed to have little fits of choking, later diagnosed as epilepsy.
Jamie was 21 months when his parents finally discovered the truth about the outlook for their son.
I was absolutely devastated.
I think it was possibly the worst day of my life.
It was just like a death really.
I mean when I left hospital with my baby I just thought he was like the other two boys, perfectly healthy.
But then to hear the actual news that he was profoundly mentally and physically disabled for life, and nothing short maybe of a new brain would fix him, it was devastating.
In the future, stem cells might help children like Jamie.
But what really stirs his father's imagination is the prospect of cloning him.
When the cloning thing came along, to me, my greatest wish would be able to recreate that little boy that I didn't have.
Jamie is not expected to live very long.
By the time Jamie dies, cloning may have become a practical option for the McErlains.
If the situation does arise that I would have the opportunity of being able to clone him and very much have that little boy that I was denied, that's my sort of wish that I would like.
His wife doesn't agree.
I know I probably would want my Jamie back, but I'd want my Jamie as he is, you know, just as I have gotten to know him.
As he is right now, I'd want him back.
I wouldn't want my Jamie if he was Yes.
But I can tell you, if Jamie was running round playing football From day one, yes.
you'd be - no, but even if he got up now and started running around, are you saying you wouldn't want him to do that? Well, I suppose I would, but Of course you would.
Yeah.
But what I would want is somebody to fix Jamie right now, and that can't be done.
So I'm prepared to let him go when the time comes, and say goodbye to my Jamie in his entirety.
It might seem that cloning a child would be like bringing him or her back to life.
But geneticist John Burn thinks such notions are fundamentally flawed.
People often think about cloned humans as sort of huge photocopies.
But of course, they're nothing like that.
If you take an adult cell from an adult person and create a new embryo, then you would be producing the same genetic make up, but in a different womb, in a different generation, so they would be nothing like as similar as, for example, identical twins that have formed naturally.
A clone might look the same, but could never really be the same because of the influence of the environment.
We know from looking at identical twins that they're not actually identical.
The outside world will have an influence on how a person develops, quite apart from their genes.
And it's not just what happens after you're born, it's also what happens to you in the womb that will have an enormous impact.
In other words, we are a combination of our nature and our nurture.
As early as 24 weeks a foetus can hear and respond to the world around him.
Its growing brain is literally shaped by what it hears.
There has been sort of some evidence to suggest that classical music particularly to stimulate the brain and not particularly in a musical sense, but just can contribute towards intelligence in general.
So obviously we want clever babies, so anything like that, that would it's worth trying.
Sara and Carl know that their triplets will be physically identical, but want to encourage their personalities to differ.
The first thing we said we'd do, we wouldn't dress them identically.
I think it would be quite important for people to be able to see them as three individual boys, that they look different for a start, as to if they're all dressed differently, I think that would help.
Sara and Carl made lots of preparations for the birth of the triplets.
But nothing could really prepare them for the shock of the babies' sudden arrival - seven weeks early.
The triplets were born on August 17th, They all came out really quickly, and they were all crying as soon as they came out, which was nice.
Now they've gone off to Special Care.
I really want to hold them.
It's like they're not mine yet really, 'cos I've only stroked his foot, that's all I've done.
It's really strange to see them all.
I can't really - I can't get an impression without holding them, I think, of what they're like.
But Three new humans have been successfully conceived, survived the perils of an early birth and are in perfect condition.
These three identical boys started out as a single embryo.
They will have different experiences and different memories.
But they will always be influenced by the fact that they are nature's clones.
At ACT, Jose's attempts of cloning have been more frustrating.
He had failure after failure.
By early October he had injected over forty human eggs with DNA, none had divided.
So, when on October 12th Jose looked at his latest batch of eggs, he expected to be disappointed yet again.
I came to the laboratory that day, I went to this incubator and opened up, I took the plate, put it under this microscope and looked through it.
Expecting dead embryos or one cell embryos, and I found that some of them had two cells, four cells and six cells, and I was really thrilled with that.
I mean as a scientist you don't get moments like this very often.
And I think to me, that was the most important one.
Jose had done something no one had ever done before, created a cloned human embryo.
His success made world headlines.
Despite the media attention, as Jose drives home, he knows he is only at the beginning of his scientific journey.
He has so far grown an embryo to the six cell stage.
To recover stem cells, which is his goal, he needs to grow an embryo of at least fifty cells.
So when we get to that point, that's going to be a big deal.
We're going to celebrate.
We have an old bottle of wine waiting been waiting there for three years, so that'll be the time to open that bottle.
In Texas the bottles are already opening.
Judson and his family celebrate what this groundbreaking science might mean for his future.
There's still a lot of challenges, a lot of risk, there's a long way to go.
It's like the first flight of the Wright brothers.
It was a total failure if you think about flying 150 feet, then crashed, okay.
And now they have, you know, jets that fly all the way around the world.
I think of this as the same thing.
You know.
Some scientists have described this as a failure, you know, it only divided three times.
You know.
It still flew.
It still flew.
How fast and how far this science will really fly is completely unpredictable.
Opponents will try to have it outlawed.
But it is unlikely that such research can now be stopped.
In the next programme we enter the world of the predictor, a world where someone's future can be read in a drop of blood.
A journey into inner-space.
Into the world of ourselves.
Because this is where our future lies, inside each one of us.
Never before could we navigate this microscopic universe, or view it so clearly.
At the heart of each cell is DNA, the substance that builds every living creature on this planet.
And now, for the first time in history, not only can we read our own DNA, but we can manipulate it.
The future is here.
Now.
It promises to rebuild broken lives.
Cells will be engineered to grow new organs.
It heralds a brave, new world of prediction.
Super-humans with unhuman abilities.
The hope of extended lives.
A true elixir of youth.
This is the eighth day of creation, as we explore how to build a human.
In the beginning was the cell, and all life was single celled.
And the cells multiplied - by cloning.
By creating identical copies.
For billions of years this was the way life reproduced.
Clones ruled the world.
Mindless and immortal.
Then, under water, sex evolved.
Sperm met egg.
The mingling of genes sparked an explosion of life.
Millions of new species.
And this potent mix of sex and chance ultimately led to us.
It's taken millions of years for blind chance to turn us from primitive humans into modern man.
But now we are taking charge.
Biologists are learning how to clone, and they are mixing genes to create new species.
But above all, they are becoming masters of the molecules they study.
We are at a turning point in history, and the potential impact of this work excites leaders in the field like Princeton's Lee Silver.
Now, as we enter the 21st Century, it is perfectly clear that we are going to understand what it means to be human at the smallest level.
We're going to be able to pick apart human cells and not only are we going to be able to understand it, we're going to be able to manipulate human beings, we're going to be able to change our genes, change our cells, change human beings in every kind of way that you can imagine.
Paul Nurse, winner of a Nobel Prize for his work on cell division, is well aware that the growing ability to manipulate DNA worries other people.
We can now do things that people couldn't imagine before.
And it really gets to the central core about what is a human being.
And I honestly think that many, many people are uncomfortable with the sorts of things that biologists and doctors can do.
Some of the most exciting and controversial work in modern biology is going on inside this building.
In here, they're about to attempt something that has never been done before, to clone a human embryo.
Doctor Jose Cibelli is working late, because tomorrow morning he will start an extraordinary experiment.
Jose's dream is to develop new ways to repair damaged humans, and he plans to do it by cloning.
I dream about this for a long time, to the point that I think it's an obsession for me, because if we can actually fulfill this dream, you can change the life of so many people, and that's why I'm obsessed with it.
I mean it's a privilege for me to be here, and I can't wait to get it done.
Jose wants to use cloning to repair people.
Not to create new people.
But though it's for medical purposes there is fierce opposition to this research.
They are afraid of this new technology because they or perhaps they have a misconception that this is that we're creating a human being when, in fact, we¡¯re just reconstructing a small group of cells.
For years Jose and his company have been cloning animals.
In 1998 they cloned the first cow.
They also cloned a rare ox called a Gower.
Now, Jose will use his skills on another species he will try to grow an early human embryo.
If he succeeds, his name will go down in history.
Until now, there's only been one way to create human embryos with egg and sperm.
Sara Waddington got pregnant the conventional way.
But even so, nature had a surprise for her.
Sara is having identical triplets.
Nature's clones.
I picked Carl up from work and he said, did you do anything interesting at work today.
And I said, no, not really.
Ch, I found out I was pregnant, but that's about it.
And he just went, you are joking? I said, no.
Sara got pregnant at almost the first attempt.
Millions of Carl's sperm travelled to Sara's waiting egg.
Just one burrowed in.
At that moment, a unique embryo was created.
But then something very strange happened.
For reasons no one understands, Sara's embryo cloned itself.
It split into two, then into three to form identical triplets.
We'd always wanted a family.
Sara wants a bigger family than I do.
I'm sort of in the middle.
But you know, we - you know, we wanted a few kids running about.
It's going to be quite good.
We just didn't expect them all to come at once.
Six months into her pregnancy Sara has a scan.
It's a chance to see how the triplets are developing.
So one, with the body round here; two, the head here and the body coming up here.
Twin three, the head here and the body's coming round there.
For the first time they're able to see a three-dimensional image of the triplets.
Now the face is coming through.
I can see that now.
The little nose, the lips, and you see the eye there.
There's a little bit of cord just over this eye here.
Professor Campbell has confirmed that Sara and Carl's triplets are boys.
You took it quite badly.
You were really shocked, weren't you? Well And it didn¡¯t just it didn't bother me at all.
It didn't bother you, but you do want a girl.
Mmm.
And you still want a girl is the point.
That's what bothers him, the fact that we might have to do it again.
Sara will give birth to identical triplets within two months.
Nature is practised at making human clones, so the odds are high of a successful outcome.
Doctor Jose Cibelli however, is going into unknown territory with his experiments.
To clone a human embryo Jose first needs human eggs.
A human egg like this.
Barely visible to the naked eye.
It could easily fit onto the tip of a pin.
Unlike the cow or bovine eggs Jose practices with, human eggs are in extremely short supply.
Tomorrow he'll work with some for the first time.
I have access to hundreds and hundreds of bovine eggs, every day.
Human eggs is completely different.
You have only perhaps tomorrow we're going to get only, we can get anywhere from zero to twenty.
And each one of them has to survive.
I cannot afford to kill one of them.
When Jose gets eggs, he will start to clone the genes of a man, a man who lives in Texas.
This man - Judson Somerville.
Judson is a doctor.
He's married with two children.
He loves sport.
He's run, biked and swum in several triathlons.
His life could be described as perfect, except for one thing.
In 1990, when he was 29, he broke his back in an accident.
In a sense it's like being a prisoner.
I'm not in a jail cell, I can get out, you know, I have freedoms that a prisoner doesn't.
But I am a prisoner of my own body.
Before his injury, Judson was an athletic six-footer.
I was a very big, strong guy.
And now I'm four foot eight in a wheelchair.
It's, you know, it's a difference, it is a difference.
I was on a bicycle ride with three other doctors, and I was coming down the mountain, and coming at a pretty good clip, and at the base there was a hair-pin turn, I naturally put on my brakes, the tyre separated and I ended up crashing.
This X-ray shows Judson's spine today.
Steel pins support the shattered bone.
The real harm though, is to his spinal cord, which has been completely severed.
Judson believes Jose's cloning work offers him hope.
If I could walk and hike and ride my bike and, you know, live a normal life like this was just a bad dream that went away, that would be fabulous.
Judson needs to grow new spinal tissue.
But how? It's not possible for an adult.
But there was a time when we could all do this amazing feat.
When we were embryos.
An embryo is made up of cells that can turn into the different cells and tissues of the human body, so an embryo has to make a heart, it has to make a liver and it has to make a brain.
That's nature's way of making a human being.
The secret ingredient that gives an embryo its power to grow and develop is a mysterious cell called an embryonic stem cell.
They first appear about a week after fertilisation.
At this point the embryo is just a small clump of cells.
Among them are a few stem cells.
Here, magnified 15,000 times, are human stem cells.
They are unique.
They alone can transform themselves into any kind of human cell.
A nerve cell, for example.
As it divides it will build a brain and spinal tissue.
Cr a heart cell.
Eventually, multiplying enough times to construct a whole heart.
Doctor Tony Atala is fascinated by the potential of stem cells.
He sees many children whose bodies are ravaged by disease, children who could benefit from stem cell technology.
In his lab he's growing new body parts and testing them on animals.
Let's say that a patient needs a windpipe, we can take a small biopsy from that patient, grow the cells outside of the body, and then seed them onto a mould in the shape of a windpipe, and then it creates a windpipe tissue which we're able to implant back into the patient.
And in fact, what you're seeing here is a windpipe which is the size that would be used in a human.
He's already built blood vessels.
And created a kidney using rat stem cells.
Here, we have a much more complex structure, a kidney, and this is a miniature kidney, but when implanted experimentally, we can actually see it make urine.
And hopefully, in 10 years, this technology would be available for patients with kidney failure.
Any type of tissue can be grown in this way.
Even spinal tissue.
Regrowing Judson's spinal cord, even partially, could transform his life.
The spinal cord's very complicated.
However, if I could even get a little more function it would make it easier for me.
I try to keep a stiff upper-lip as they say, but there's a lot of things that are very frustrating.
Getting around, getting in and out of my car, getting in and out of bed, getting in the shower, getting onto the toilet, you know.
Once I get to bed it's just like I made it, I made it one more day.
Stem cells offer the hope of doing what his own body cannot.
Like Judson, this rat has a severed spine.
Its legs are paralysed.
To treat it, doctors twisted fibres into the shape of spinal cord, seeded them with stem cells and implanted them into the rat's back.
Stimulated by a molecular signal, the stem cells started to grow, forming new spinal tissue.
The results surpassed all expectations.
When we started this project we were hoping to see any sign of neurological recovery, such as movement of a toe maybe, is what our initial hope was.
And this was just completely unexpected.
The effects of stem cell therapy were dramatic.
Although still weak, the rat's legs are moving.
Messages from the brain are getting through.
Post-mortems carried out on other rats show how well the spinal cord had regrown.
So rat stem cells can patch up a rat's spine.
But to fix his spine, Judson would need human stem cells, preferably stem cells that won't be rejected by his body.
Cells that match his own DNA.
Judson needs stem cells cloned from his own body.
To get stem cells what you really need is an embryo of the patient that we're trying to treat.
And the only way we can do that is by cloning, that is by taking one of the cells of the patient, putting it into an egg - a human egg, and then allowing that egg to turn into an embryo and produce the stem cells that we need.
And it's by this cloning process that we can generate cells that won't be rejected by the patient's body.
And this is why Jose is preparing to clone cells from Judson.
He passionately believes that this process called Therapeutic Cloning could transform the lives of many people.
A recent survey is saying that about 120 million people can potentially benefit from this therapy, so this is a revolution in medicine.
And such a revolution could impact on all our lives.
Imagine, you're driving home.
Your kidneys, liver, heart all damaged beyond repair.
While you're on life support plans for growing replacement parts can begin.
Using cloned stem cells doctors will grow spare parts that are exact doubles of the originals.
But this vision of the future depends on creating cloned human embryos, something no one has ever done before.
Jose Cibelli, however, is going to try.
The BBC have been given exclusive access to follow the whole procedure.
First of all, Jose needs human eggs.
He waits outside while they're collected from an anonymous donor at a nearby clinic.
Human eggs are so hard to obtain that, initially, Jose's wife volunteered to donate hers.
This is a difficult procedure.
My wife wanted to do it, and she partially started to be stimulated and then had to be stopped.
She's not the right age.
So I am very, very thankful for this woman that is going to help us get the research done.
A security guard is with Jose to ensure the eggs don't go astray.
Human eggs are precious, because a woman's ovaries normally produce just one egg every month.
But under the influence of hormone injections a woman's body can produce up to twenty eggs at a time.
As with infertility treatments, the eggs are collected under local an aesthetic.
Afterwards, the eggs are carefully counted and inspected.
Each egg is less than a tenth of a millimetre wide.
So Jose, do you know how many? We got seven.
Seven.
So that's good.
They predicted east night, I didn't get the message, but they predicted eight.
So they got seven.
That's pretty good.
These eggs could mark the start of a new era in medicine.
The quest to repair people by cloning.
You see, I - I don't want to think about it until we actually see the cells growing, I don't want to think about it.
And when it's time to celebrate, we'll celebrate.
Arriving safely back at HQ the security guard still accompanies Jose down to his lab.
The eggs will remain under lock and key.
Jose now faces the greatest challenge of his life.
He will use these eggs to try to create the first few cells of an embryo of Judson.
To do this, Jose needs one more vital ingredient - Judson's own cells.
I took a small cutter similar to the straw, and then with a circular twisting motion bored down through the skin to pull the biopsy out, and when I pulled it out, the bit of tissue stays inside of the cutter.
Fortunately, I don't have any sensation so it doesn't hurt, but it certainly looks pretty horrible when you're doing it.
This is a vial that contains several thousands of cells from the skin of Jud.
So what I'm going to do today, I'm going to take one of these cells, just one, and inject it into an egg.
Judson's skill cell, like almost every other cell in his body, contains all the genetic information needed to build another Judson.
No skin cell is visible to the naked eye.
But enlarged 60,000 times the breathtaking interior world of the cell bursts into view.
At the heart of the cell lies the nucleus.
Protected inside the nucleus are chromosomes.
Chromosomes are nothing more than tightly bound packages of DNA.
When they're unravelled, the characteristic double-strands of DNA are revealed.
Each strand of DNA carried hundreds of genes.
And it's these genes that build everything, from the shape of your nose to the colour of your skin.
Jose will insert the nucleus containing Judson's DNA into a human egg.
Doing this should turn the adult skin cell back into its early embryonic form.
But how it does this is a mystery.
We know the magic is in the egg.
Now, how it works, we don't know, and we keep saying that the person that can find that out should be given the Nobel Prize.
First, Jose has to remove the glowing nucleus out of the tiny egg.
This nucleus contains the genetic material of the woman who donated this egg.
It cannot be mixed with Judson's DNA or a hybrid would result.
Now, Jose is ready to collect one of Judson's skin cells.
I'm trying to load the cell inside the pipette.
Okay, the cell is inside the pipette.
I'm going to go and I'm going to go and grab an egg and inject the cell in.
Finally, Jose is ready to begin.
So I'm ready to inject one of these cells into the egg for the first time.
So anything could happen.
It could be that we end up killing the egg without even doing anything.
So I'm very nervous, and my heart is pumping, so I'd better stop talking.
Jose is about to cross an entirely new frontier.
So I just went through the zone, and now I'm gonna go try to pierce the membrane, I'll be very gentle.
One stroke should be enough, I guess.
For the first time in history we are seeing instead of a sperm, a cell containing the complete genetic make up of a human go into a human egg.
And now I'm going to go backward very slowly.
The first egg now has Judson's skin cell inside it.
Jose then injects the remaining eggs with skin cells.
He will use chemicals to shock each egg into behaving as if it had been fertilised.
If it works they will divide.
The egg's still waiting for a sperm.
If we don't do anything they are just going to sit there.
So we are going to let it sit there for about two hours, and then we're going to trigger development artificially, without sperm.
If these eggs divide we will be a step closer to the age of truly personalised medicine.
And stem cells will have wider usage than just building body parts.
They could also provide treatments for diseases like diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
Ultimately, perhaps, they could be used to replace older cells.
Delaying the ageing process.
But these dreams lie in the future.
For now, Jose has to wait.
It will be two days before he knows if the eggs have divided.
Jose is trying to grow an embryo for stem cells.
Even advocates of such research are aware that many people will find this unacceptable.
These advances in modern medicine and biology are really getting to the core of what life is, and that makes many people very uncomfortable.
So taking an embryo and using the cells is something that many people think is murder.
Others think that murder is a strange term to apply to a group of cells so small they could fit on the tip of a pin.
All you have at the beginning for the first two weeks, is a mass of cells, and when you want to make embryonic stem cells what you're doing is taking cells from this initial embryo, which is just a mass of cells.
So it is alive in the sense that, yes, it's a human life, but it's not alive in the sense of being conscious.
And I think there's quite a difference between conscious life and cellular life.
At the moment, human embryos are the best source of stem cells.
Until new sources of stem cells are found the debate about their use will continue.
Jose Cibelli is about to discover if the eggs have divided or cleaved.
We'll be very, very lucky if we get development today, because this is the first try, and usually the first try doesn't work.
So I'm trying to be mentally prepared for not seeing them cleave.
If the eggs have divided while in this incubator, Jose will have produced the first few cells of Judson Somerville's clone.
No, there's no cleavage, there's no cleavage.
They are - basically they are rested, as a one cell.
So they're alive, some of them are alive, but they haven't cleaved.
So this time it didn't work.
We'll have to try it again.
Very disappointed.
I'll have to try it again.
I guess they said that we haven't failed if we keep trying, so we're going to keep trying.
There are those who will be glad that Jose has failed.
For one of the main fears about this technology is that it will not stop at cloning stem cells.
Going from cloning a few cells to cloning a child would be a huge leap.
But there will be demand, in some cases, hard to resist.
There are certain human situations where one has lots of sympathy for the people involved.
An example would be where parents have a child who has died or dying, and they might be tempted to think about reproductive cloning.
So that they could somehow bring that child back to life.
My own personal view is that I really don't think that's a good idea, I really don't.
Human cells live on for a few hours after death, so cloning the dead is theoretically possible.
But if you really wanted to replace a child, it would be better to take cells from the living, before they die.
James McErlain sees cloning as a future option for his child.
My little boy, Jamie, is seven years of age, and he's physically perfect, a beautiful body, beautiful limbs.
He - unfortunately, he mightn't live until he's ten.
Jamie is severely brain damaged.
He has only peripheral vision; he cannot talk, and he has no control over any of his muscles.
He has the mental ability of a baby.
He's been in comas several times.
He requires his parents' care 24 hours a day.
They believe that while he was in the womb Jamie's brain was perfect, that his genes built a normal baby.
However, Jamie's birth was difficult.
Soon after, he seemed to have little fits of choking, later diagnosed as epilepsy.
Jamie was 21 months when his parents finally discovered the truth about the outlook for their son.
I was absolutely devastated.
I think it was possibly the worst day of my life.
It was just like a death really.
I mean when I left hospital with my baby I just thought he was like the other two boys, perfectly healthy.
But then to hear the actual news that he was profoundly mentally and physically disabled for life, and nothing short maybe of a new brain would fix him, it was devastating.
In the future, stem cells might help children like Jamie.
But what really stirs his father's imagination is the prospect of cloning him.
When the cloning thing came along, to me, my greatest wish would be able to recreate that little boy that I didn't have.
Jamie is not expected to live very long.
By the time Jamie dies, cloning may have become a practical option for the McErlains.
If the situation does arise that I would have the opportunity of being able to clone him and very much have that little boy that I was denied, that's my sort of wish that I would like.
His wife doesn't agree.
I know I probably would want my Jamie back, but I'd want my Jamie as he is, you know, just as I have gotten to know him.
As he is right now, I'd want him back.
I wouldn't want my Jamie if he was Yes.
But I can tell you, if Jamie was running round playing football From day one, yes.
you'd be - no, but even if he got up now and started running around, are you saying you wouldn't want him to do that? Well, I suppose I would, but Of course you would.
Yeah.
But what I would want is somebody to fix Jamie right now, and that can't be done.
So I'm prepared to let him go when the time comes, and say goodbye to my Jamie in his entirety.
It might seem that cloning a child would be like bringing him or her back to life.
But geneticist John Burn thinks such notions are fundamentally flawed.
People often think about cloned humans as sort of huge photocopies.
But of course, they're nothing like that.
If you take an adult cell from an adult person and create a new embryo, then you would be producing the same genetic make up, but in a different womb, in a different generation, so they would be nothing like as similar as, for example, identical twins that have formed naturally.
A clone might look the same, but could never really be the same because of the influence of the environment.
We know from looking at identical twins that they're not actually identical.
The outside world will have an influence on how a person develops, quite apart from their genes.
And it's not just what happens after you're born, it's also what happens to you in the womb that will have an enormous impact.
In other words, we are a combination of our nature and our nurture.
As early as 24 weeks a foetus can hear and respond to the world around him.
Its growing brain is literally shaped by what it hears.
There has been sort of some evidence to suggest that classical music particularly to stimulate the brain and not particularly in a musical sense, but just can contribute towards intelligence in general.
So obviously we want clever babies, so anything like that, that would it's worth trying.
Sara and Carl know that their triplets will be physically identical, but want to encourage their personalities to differ.
The first thing we said we'd do, we wouldn't dress them identically.
I think it would be quite important for people to be able to see them as three individual boys, that they look different for a start, as to if they're all dressed differently, I think that would help.
Sara and Carl made lots of preparations for the birth of the triplets.
But nothing could really prepare them for the shock of the babies' sudden arrival - seven weeks early.
The triplets were born on August 17th, They all came out really quickly, and they were all crying as soon as they came out, which was nice.
Now they've gone off to Special Care.
I really want to hold them.
It's like they're not mine yet really, 'cos I've only stroked his foot, that's all I've done.
It's really strange to see them all.
I can't really - I can't get an impression without holding them, I think, of what they're like.
But Three new humans have been successfully conceived, survived the perils of an early birth and are in perfect condition.
These three identical boys started out as a single embryo.
They will have different experiences and different memories.
But they will always be influenced by the fact that they are nature's clones.
At ACT, Jose's attempts of cloning have been more frustrating.
He had failure after failure.
By early October he had injected over forty human eggs with DNA, none had divided.
So, when on October 12th Jose looked at his latest batch of eggs, he expected to be disappointed yet again.
I came to the laboratory that day, I went to this incubator and opened up, I took the plate, put it under this microscope and looked through it.
Expecting dead embryos or one cell embryos, and I found that some of them had two cells, four cells and six cells, and I was really thrilled with that.
I mean as a scientist you don't get moments like this very often.
And I think to me, that was the most important one.
Jose had done something no one had ever done before, created a cloned human embryo.
His success made world headlines.
Despite the media attention, as Jose drives home, he knows he is only at the beginning of his scientific journey.
He has so far grown an embryo to the six cell stage.
To recover stem cells, which is his goal, he needs to grow an embryo of at least fifty cells.
So when we get to that point, that's going to be a big deal.
We're going to celebrate.
We have an old bottle of wine waiting been waiting there for three years, so that'll be the time to open that bottle.
In Texas the bottles are already opening.
Judson and his family celebrate what this groundbreaking science might mean for his future.
There's still a lot of challenges, a lot of risk, there's a long way to go.
It's like the first flight of the Wright brothers.
It was a total failure if you think about flying 150 feet, then crashed, okay.
And now they have, you know, jets that fly all the way around the world.
I think of this as the same thing.
You know.
Some scientists have described this as a failure, you know, it only divided three times.
You know.
It still flew.
It still flew.
How fast and how far this science will really fly is completely unpredictable.
Opponents will try to have it outlawed.
But it is unlikely that such research can now be stopped.
In the next programme we enter the world of the predictor, a world where someone's future can be read in a drop of blood.