Editorial: Cloning clinic lays down a challenge

First they cloned a sheep, affectionately named Dolly. Soon they had cloned a cow, and a chicken. At each cloning the question loomed louder: is human life sacred?

Apparently not to American clinician Professor Severino Antinori who announced at the weekend that, as far as he is concerned, "the genie is out of the bottle" and he plans to offer cloning as a solution for childless couples. He and an Italian colleague are already selecting suitable couples. One might wonder why he bothers with couples. Cloning, by definition, reproduces a single parent. He might just as well offer the service to individuals and provide paid surrogate mothers.

That is why it is altogether more disturbing than any of the artificial reproduction techniques that have previously received ethical attention. Some of those test-tube procedures seemed far removed from the mystery and dignity of natural reproduction but at least the test-tube baby was a product of the two human elements fusing and producing a different human being. There may be nothing different about a cloned person, unless he or she is concocted from the cells of more than one person in some frightful effort to perfect the species. That is the nightmare. It is hard to contemplate cloning without raising the spectre of eugenics. What other purpose could be served by cloning a complete human being?

Cloning could also serve some very attractive medical purposes. The possibility that human stem cells might be used to produce replacement organs is a compelling reason to tread carefully in response to the challenge that Professor Antinori has issued.

To ban cloning outright would be as unwise as allowing the science to go unregulated. Neither is it a practical option. An outright ban would be evaded, probably by experiments conducted in parts of the world where respect for human dignity is not all it should be.

Without waiting for a report from a committee set up to consider the ethical, moral and scientific issues involved, Britain has recently passed legislation permitting the cloning of stem cells from human embryos. Germany, by contrast, has forbidden the production of human embryos for the extraction of organs, going so far as to urge the European Union to consider sanctions against Britain for approving the procedure. One of the members of the German Parliament's ethics committee said: "To breed a human being only to kill it, disembowel it and impregnate something with it - that's basically cannibalism."

That objection can be met by deciding that human life begins some time after cells begin forming an embryo. For medical cloning purposes life is reckoned to begin after 14 days. It is then, evidently, that cells have differentiated sufficiently to be dividing into organs and becoming a recognisable foetus. Researchers are asking for just 14 days of early cell development in which to extract stem cells from which an organ can be formed.

Regulators may have to move rapidly. It emerged yesterday that researchers in Australia implanted a cell containing human DNA into the egg of a pig two years ago and had to terminate it after 32 days. It is too likely that cowboy experimentation of this sort is going on in laboratories the world over. Sensible boundaries need to be drawn without delay.

What is the point of cloning a person in any case? As Dolly the sheep is proving, a cloned animal starts with the organic age of its parent. Its body deteriorates at the adult rate and might live not much longer than the parent.

Who knows? Who needs to find out?