Roger Highfield reports on a controversial technique to fight disease
HUMAN embryos could be cloned to help provide novel treatments for injury and disease within a matter of years, the Human Genetics Advisory Committee said yesterday.
The Government advisers launched a public consultation exercise with a document that distinguished reproductive cloning - the production of genetically identical human beings - from therapeutic cloning, where early embryos may be cloned to develop treatments to improve life expectancy and quality of life.
Under the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act licensed research on human embryos up to 14 days old is already permitted. Ruth Deech, chairman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, said such experiments could involve the creation of embryo clones for the development of new treatments.
"For that sort of research, which has yet to be carried out, [it] would not involve going as far as making anybody pregnant. We are just talking about research on the very earliest stages of a fertilised embryo," Mrs Deech said.
"We would never grant a licence for any treatment that would result in the production of an actual cloned baby," she added. But the HFEA will consider applications for work on therapeutic cloning that will bring benefits to patients.
So far no one had asked for a licence to carry out therapeutic cloning but she said the authority would consider applications that had been approved by an ethics committee and reviewed by scientists.
The cloning working group of the HGAC and HFEA is concerned that a blanket ban on all cloning would prevent this research on therapeutic cloning . "We have got to be careful not to legislate too rigidly too soon," said Sir Colin Campbell, chairman of the HGAC.
Members want "to stop the wild and irresponsible notion of cloning whole human beings" but allow "procedures that may in four to five to eight years' time lead to the curing of diseases".
But the public must be consulted on where to draw the ethical and policy boundaries, said Sir Colin. "Then we will be able to advise ministers, probably later this year, about how we think ministers ought to make policy."
Nicholas Coote, assistant general secretary of the Catholic Bishops' Conference, said that he could not support using and destroying human embryos.
Peter Garrett, research director of the anti-abortion charity Life, said: "We know what a nightmare world is just around the corner if we once accept any manipulation of human life in this way.
"They want to lull us into allowing the cloners to get to work by proposing a 14-day limit on the clones' lives initially.
"Then we get all the usual utilitarian talk about 'potential benefits of research' using laboratory clones. Having got us used to the idea, they will quickly relax the age limit and away we will go, full sail ahead, in a year or two's time."
Since the birth of Dolly, the cloned sheep, there had been "hysterical stories on the possibility of genetically copying human beings", said Sir Colin. "An awful lot of the scare stories are science fiction, not science fact. In this country, that can't happen."
Since the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act was passed in 1990, cloning of whole human beings had effectively been banned, he said.
The everyday use of the term cloning was misleading, he added. A genetic copy would never be truly identical because the "individual would have a different experience in the womb, a different birth, a different mother and a different environment".
