Cloning go-ahead gives hope to millions

Millions of people who have diseases which are currently incurable were given hope today 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.

And 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 advancement involved.

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 proud and 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.”