Bush adviser accuses Britain of crossing 'moral boundary' on cloning

1.00pm - By MAXINE FRITH


President Bush's chief adviser on medical ethics yesterday accused Britain of crossing a "moral boundary" by allowing scientists to clone human embryos.
Dr Leon Kass spoke ahead of a key United Nations vote which the Americans hope will ensure a worldwide ban on all forms of cloning.

British scientists, backed by the Government, say that such a ban would seriously hamper vital research into diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Last month scientists at Newcastle University were granted the first British licence to clone human embryos for research.

Therapeutic cloning involves creating copies of human embryos and harvesting stem cells from them which can develop into any tissue of the human body. The embryos are destroyed before they are 14 days old and are still simply a cluster of cells no bigger than a pinhead.

Therapeutic cloning has been legal in Britain since 2002 although reproductive cloning - which aims to create human life - is outlawed in the UK and most of the rest of the world.

Some maverick scientists such as the Raelian claim they have already created a cloned baby, although they have produced no evidence to back up their announcements.

The United Nations is due to vote tomorrow on whether to back a worldwide ban on therapeutic and reproductive cloning.

Mr Bush and the Costa Rican government are in favour of a UN resolution which would outlaw all forms of cloning. But Britain is backing a Belgian proposal which would ban reproductive cloning but allow countries to decide on an individual basis whether or not to allow therapeutic cloning.

The issue has split international opinion and wavering countries have been subjected to fierce lobbying from both sides.

It has also become an issue in the US elections, with Bush fervently opposed to all forms of stem cell research and John Kerry backing scientists who want to carry out therapeutic cloning. Stars such as the late Christopher Reeve and the actor Michael J Fox, who has Parkinson's disease, have also backed stem cell research.

Dr Kass, chairman of President Bush's Council on Bioethics, spoke out at the annual conference of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Philadelphia yesterday.

He said: "I am afraid I do think that Britain is wrong. What we want is a stop to all cloning procedures. I think that the only effective way to stop cloning for reproductive purposes is to stop this process at the start."

He added: "I think one has to be very careful about crossing three major moral boundaries. First, creating human life purely for research.

"It is one thing to say that for IVF embryos which are doomed to die in a freezer, their death might be redeemed by experimenting on them so that others can benefit from it. It is quite another thing to create new human embryos simply for research.

"This is the first step towards having a situation where a human life is determined, not by a chance union of egg and sperm, but by the deliberate design of someone. A woman's body should not be a laboratory for research or a factory for spare body parts. No child should be forced to say, 'my father or mother is an embryonic stem cell'."

Health Secretary John Reid has said that while Britain is "totally opposed" to reproductive cloning, therapeutic research should be encouraged.

"We believe it offers huge potential to develop new cures for life threatening diseases which blight the lives of millions," he said.

Lord May of Oxford, president of the Royal Society, accused Mr Bush of trying to push the vote through the UN because he had failed to win backing for a ban from Congress.

- INDEPENDENT