Cloning breakthrough reignites ethical debate

By STEVE CONNOR in Seattle and CHARLES ARTHUR

It is an announcement that has divided scientists, politicians and pundits. Scientists have for the first time created human embryos by cloning adult cells.

The report, published in the journal Science, said a team in South Korea led by Woo Suk Hwang had used a similar cloning method to the one that produced Dolly the sheep, but with human cells and eggs.

They removed the egg's nucleus, and inserted a nucleus from an adult cell. The egg began to grow like a fertilised embryo. In all, there were 30 embryos.

However rather than implanting it into a woman's womb, the team let the embryos grow to about 100 cells, and then tried to take cells from inside them, to see if they would act as stem cells. These are capable of growing into virtually any specialised tissue, such as heart, muscle or skin.

This opens the door to future medical treatments which might replace faulty or dying cells with fresh, working stem cells taken from cloned embryos grown from the patient themselves. That is therapeutic cloning - unlike reproductive cloning, which aims to produce babies.

But Professor Hwang's announcement reignited the debate over cloning in all its forms, and the three incompatible views: those completely against cloning, those in favour of its limited use for medical research, and those who want to produce cloned babies.

Essentially, none thinks the other two has the right idea - and all are waging political and scientific battles to try to make sure that their view holds sway.

The views of patient groups might be key in swinging legislators' minds. In theory, embryonic stem cells could treat a range of disorders such as osteoarthritis or Parkinson's disease, by being transplanted to replace damaged or dead cells.

Patient groups welcomed the news, but cautiously.

"This is the first time this has been done using human cells and it has been published in a reputable, peer-reviewed journal so that we can have a lot of confidence in the science," said Alistair Kent, director of the Genetic Interest Group in Britain, an alliance of patient organisations.

Roger Pedersen, an American stem-cell expert who left the US in 2001 because of its restrictive position on embryo research, who is now professor of regenerative medicine at Cambridge University, said that the Korean research substantially advances the prospect of using tissue transplants derived from a patient's own cells.

"This will likely accelerate the development of alternative ways of reprogramming human cells, which could in the future diminish the need to use human eggs for this purpose," Professor Pedersen said.

But the initiative was immediately condemned by opponents of cloning.

Dr Donald Bruce, director of the Church of Scotland's society, religion and technology project, said it was "irresponsible science". He called for an immediate United Nations ban on reproductive human cloning.

But earlier attempts to introduce such a ban through the UN failed because the US, urged on by the religious right, attempted to extend the ban to therapeutic uses. That was resisted by too many countries, including the UK, which in 2002 issued its first licences for therapeutic cloning. Others had different reasons to dislike the work.

"Cloning research is impossible to do without exploiting women. It should be banned immediately," said Daniel McConchie, a spokesman for the Centre for Bioethics and Human Dignity in Chicago.

And what about the pro-cloners - the ones trying to produce cloned children?

Clonaid, the company set up by the Swiss-based Raelian sect, which insists that humans are cloned versions of aliens, chose yesterday to announce on its website that a sixth cloned child had been born in Australia.

The company claimed that the first was born in December 2002, but no proof ever emerged.

Clonaid is the leader - at least in its claims - of the reproductive cloning group.

That includes Panos Zavos, an IVF expert based in the US, who has repeatedly claimed that he has implanted cloned embryos into woman; last week he said one had miscarried.

The Italian doctor Severino Antinori has been silent for some time after claiming in 2002 he would be first to clone a human. Richard Seed, an American expert who made similar claims, has also failed to find the limelight for a couple of years.

Clonaid also says that it has produced eight successful pregnancies from 20 implantations in its latest round of cloning - a result that, if true, would have cloning scientists flocking to its laboratories to find out its secrets. For the reality is that producing embryos by cloning adult cells is a hit-and-miss affair - and mostly miss.

Professor Hwang and his colleagues collected human eggs from 16 unpaid volunteers who had signed "informed consent" agreements to allow their eggs to be used in research. They collected a total of 242 eggs but only managed to generate 30 cloned embryos, of which only 20 were of good enough quality to attempt stem-cell extraction.

The Korean researchers said their comparative success was due to using extremely fresh human eggs and using a new technique for extracting the egg nucleus by gently squeezing it out of the cell rather than inserting a microscopic glass tube and sucking it out.

Generally, animal cloning has demonstrated that pregnancies from cloned cells are difficult to achieve and unlikely to succeed.

Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, was the only live birth of a healthy lamb from 277 attempts - and eight embryos. Although scientists have improved their techniques since then, the odds are still against them.

Rudolph Jaenisch, a world authority on cloning and professor of biology at the Whitehead Institute in Massachusetts, said the Korean study was the first time anyone had shown unequivocally that it was possible to clone human embryos using the Dolly technique of "cell nuclear transfer".

But illustrating the way that the three sides of the debate cannot coexist, he added: "It would be unethical to use this research to move to reproductive cloning of a baby because the animal research has shown that all clones are to some extent abnormal," Professor Jaenisch said.

"They [Antinori and Zavos] are not going to get normal babies, no way," he said.

- INDEPENDENT