Dolly creator bids to clone humans

The creator of Dolly the sheep hopes to lodge the first application to clone human embryos in Britain within six months, it emerged today.

Professor Ian Wilmut, in charge of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, said that if the institute approved the idea, it would then be considered by external regulators.

If given the green light the professor’s research is likely to focus on human embryonic stem cells – parent cells that can develop into any type of tissue.

He hopes to use the same technique which cloned Dolly – nuclear transfer – to clone early human embryos, genetically identical to cells taken from the adult.

“An application for human stem cell research has evolved and is now under way,” Professor Wilmut said from his home in the Scottish Borders.

“If it is approved by the institute’s ethics and management committee then it will face external bodies. We expect the whole process to take about six months.”

Professor Wilmut said he still had no wish to clone babies by implanting cloned embryos into a surrogate mother, which is illegal.

The scientist, whose research has found that all the world’s cloned animals are genetically and physically defective, believes it to be unethical and unsafe.

Dolly, the sheep cloned by him five years ago, has already shown defects – she was born with abnormal chromosomes.

Professor Wilmut hopes to create stem cell lines that could one day help treat heart disease or test how someone might respond to drugs.

His research could focus on growing cardiac cells to repair a failing heart and nerve cells to treat Parkinson’s disease, or islet cells for diabetes sufferers.

The scientist received the Ernst Schering Prize at a scientific conference in Berlin earlier this month.

In a speech to delegates, he said: “Based on stem cells from a variety of donors, we can investigate the possible differences in the metabolism of an active ingredient and thus predict the effect before administering it.”

The licensing process will take in at least four ethics committees, including the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s science and clinical review boards.

The application comes after American company, Advanced Cell Technology, last year claimed to have cloned early human embryos.