JEANNE MESERVE, CNN ANCHOR: And in a significant development with potential for organ transplants, the company that brought us Dolly the sheep three years ago has now cloned pigs. CNN's Tom Mintier that story.</s>TOM MINTIER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Scientists on a farm in Blacksburg, Virginia have created five female piglets by cloning or making five copies of a single egg. Little Millie, named after the millennium; Christa, after Christian Bernard, who performed the world's first human heart transplant; three and four, Alexis and Carol, after a Nobel prize winner who won for transplant medicine in 1912; the final pig was named dot.com for e-commerce. The people behind this project hope it could pave the way for creating organs for human transplant.</s>RON JAMES, PPL MANAGER DIRECTOR: We think that will take us about three years, and then we'll get to testing these organs in primates. And within four years, we could be in clinical trials with humans.</s>MINTIER: If creating organs for transplant from cloned pigs ever works, it could help reduce an existing shortage of transplantable hearts, livers and kidneys. The waiting list for organ donors is huge, nearly 70,000 in America and another 50,000 in Europe. Researchers have already faced the ethics questions when Dolly was cloned.</s>JAMES: The people at the moment who most readily accept this idea are those people who are on waiting lists for organs and who, indeed, may die before they get the organs. If you go and talk to these people, they're not scared. They say: As soon as it's done, we would like to have one.</s>MINTIER: One other area that scientists are working on is creating pigs that make insulin producing cells. Those cells would be transplanted to diabetic patients who, if it works, would no longer need daily injections.
Scientists Clone Pigs, Hope to Pave Way for Creating Organs for Human Transplant