Will cloning cure these people?

MILLIONS of people who have diseases which are currently incurable were given hope yesterday when British scientists were granted permission to clone human embryos for medical research.

Ever since 1996, when Dolly the Sheep - the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell - was born, there has been hope that cures for serious debilitating diseases are just around the corner.

In 2000, a team at Texas A&M University cloned a bull named “86 Squared” which was naturally resistant to three serious cattle diseases - brucellosis, tuberculosis and salmonellosis.

In the same year, US scientists announced they had restored movement to paralysed mice by injecting stem cells into their spinal fluid.

Now scientists at the University of Newcastle say clinical trials of human cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes may only be five to ten years away.

Often the moral alarm over human cloning can overshadow the scientific achievement. For example, after Dolly was born, German magazine Der Spiegel featured a row of cloned Hitlers on its front cover.

While cloning to create copies of human babies is outlawed in Britain, the Newcastle researchers’ therapeutic cloning plan has also raised ethical questions because of the waste of embryos.

The scientists plan to duplicate early-stage embryos and extract stem cells from them which can be used for radical new treatments.

The embryos are destroyed before they are 14-days-old and never allowed to develop beyond a cluster of cells the size of a pinhead.

Arlene Judith Klotzko, honorary lecturer in bioethics at University College, London, believes the potential to save lives by conducting therapeutic cloning far outweighs the ethical arguments against it.

“If it was ethically abominable we wouldn’t do it,” she said.

“The embryo is as large as a grain of sand. It’s a ball of cells. It is not a person, but the people who are sick are dying are - they need our help.

“What (some people) are saying is ‘We don’t need to do this, we can use adult stem cells, (they) are just as good.’ But they are not. Embryo stem cells are much better.

“From a point of view of science there are things they can learn from this that they cannot learn anywhere else.”

Ms Klotzko also said that tight regulation, such as that by the HFEA which granted the initial one-year research licence to the Newcastle Centre for Life, will ensure that human cloning does not happen.

“The UK is the only country in the West that is allowing therapeutic cloning,” she said. “That’s fine here because it’s so tightly regulated.

“People are worried about embryos being planted in a woman. In other countries that could happen but here it’s not going to.

“People here should be reassured by that.”

The writer-in-residence at the Science Museum, London, and author of Clone of Your Own? added: “It’s going to take time (to find cures). But that’s even more reason why everybody who can do the research should do it.”

Cloning Q&A

What are the scientists hoping to do?

Scientists from the Institute of Human Genetics at Newcastle University and the Newcastle Fertility Centre want to carry out research on human embryos. They are trying to develop new treatments for diabetes, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

What will the research involve?

The team are investing a cloning technique called cell nuclear replacement (CNR), in which the nucleus of a human egg cell is removed and replaced with the nucleus from a human body cell, such as a skin cell.

The egg is then artificially stimulated. This causes the egg to divide and behave in a similar way to a standard embryo fertilised by sperm. The eggs used in the research will have been created as part of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment. The embryos would be cultured until they start producing stem cells. These are the body’s master cells which have the potential to develop into many different types of tissue. The scientists would extract these stem cells from the embryos in this very early stage of development. The embryos would then be destroyed.

What is the point of the research?

The idea is that the stem cells can be put into an individual’s body. These cells would be used to create insulin-producing cells which could be inserted into diabetes patients, using some of their own DNA to ensure their bodies do not reject the cells.

How long before patients can benefit from these treatments?

It is likely to be at least five years before such trials start, and it could be many more years before embryonic stem cell treatments are available to patients.

Have other scientists created cloned human embryos?

Yes. A South Korean team announced earlier this year that they had 30 embryos that were the exact genetic copies of the women who donated the eggs and cells to make them.

The embryos were allowed to develop for several days, and embryonic stem cells were extracted from them.

The eventual aim, in this case, is to use such cells to replace those that have failed in patients with degenerative diseases, such as some heart conditions and Parkinson’s, or in spinal cord injuries.