Britain is on the way to allowing embryo cloning
Tamara Traubman
In a first step towards removing some of the restrictions on human cloning in the UK, tomorrow the Director General of the British Ministry of Health will publish a report in which he recommends allowing - subject to restrictions - the cloning of human embryos for research purposes. The British newspaper "Daily Telegraph" published yesterday that the government will announce the adoption of the report's recommendations, and will support new legislation that will allow the cloning of human embryos. The vote on the law will take place in the fall, and Prime Minister Tony Blair will give the members of parliament the freedom to vote on the matter, because it is a "personally conscientious" decision.
The idea of human cloning resonates with many, while others actually see it as an exciting way to cure diseases, which are currently incurable. To examine the advantages of cloning, a committee was established a year ago, chaired by the Director General of the British Ministry of Health Prof. Liam Donlandson. In the report they wrote and will be published tomorrow, they determined that the benefit of cloning outweighs all ethical considerations.
However, the committee will recommend that scientists be allowed to clone human embryos and use them only in a research setting, not commercially. It will also recommend that the ban on using cloning as a substitute for birth (that is, to clone embryos that will develop into a baby) and the ban on cloning that uses eggs from animals and human cells be left in place.
Experts say that by means of cloning technology - the creation of genetic copies - it will be possible to produce an inexhaustible pool of tissues for transplantation, such as tissues of nerve cells and liver cells. In the cloning process, a nucleus is removed from a human cell - most of the DNA in the cell is in the nucleus - and it is inserted into an egg whose nucleus has been removed. An electric current connects the nucleus to the egg, which then begins to develop into an embryo. When the embryo is a few days old - in fact it is a "lump" of cells without characteristics - it is possible to isolate embryonic stem cells from it.
These stem cells, which exist only in the fetus, have not yet "decided" what type of cell they will develop into in the future, so it is possible to direct their development to all types of cells in the body, and use them as an inexhaustible pool of tissue for transplantation. Thus, for example, they could create nerve cells to be transplanted into the brains of patients with degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, pancreatic cells to be transplanted into diabetic patients or liver cells to be transplanted into the livers of patients with liver diseases.
Politicians in Europe, who were amazed three years ago by the replication of Dolly the sheep - the first animal to be successfully cloned from an adult cell - hastened to enact laws prohibiting any kind of human cloning. The US government also imposed a five-year ban on human cloning on federally funded research institutions. The ban does not apply to private companies, but as far as is known, they do not do so, for fear of public criticism and fierce opposition from conservative groups that oppose human cloning in general. In Israel, the situation is similar: about two years ago, the Knesset accepted a bill by MK Hagi Marom that imposes a five-year ban on any type of human cloning.
But today, more and more ethicists, scientists and jurists believe that human cloning should begin to be allowed, under limitations. Prof. Michel Rebel from the Weizmann Institute, a member of UNESCO's International Committee on Bioethics, says that already in March the committee prepared a report in which he also recommends allowing the cloning of human embryos in a research setting only. Rebel, who is also the chairman of the National Committee for Biotechnology, said that the Israeli law also stated that a special committee of the Ministry of Health could allow human cloning before the end of the period set by the law, but at the moment there are no such intentions.
"Many more years will pass because the method is not ready," he says. "But I think the day will come when we will know how to do it safely, and instead of a couple needing an egg donation or an anonymous sperm donation from a person outside of their marriage, they will be able to use cloning."
The first step towards cloning human embryos was apparently already taken four years ago in the United States. A small company called "Cell Technology" Advanced announced that a clone passed by using a cow's egg and a cell nucleus taken from one of the company's employees, but never published proof of this. This cloning is not included in the category of human cloning and most scientists do not consider it the best way, because it does not use a human egg. However, the method demonstrates the enormous potential inherent in cloning for organ transplant purposes: the scientists want to use a cell taken from a patient in need of a transplant to produce genetically similar tissues from it, which the patient's body will not reject.
Referring to the fact that with this method, a sick person will actually cause the death of the fetus that could have developed into his twin brother, Rebel said that even in in vitro fertilization, embryos usually remain, which are eventually destroyed. According to him, "even from a halachic point of view, he still does not have the status of a person."
{Appeared in Haaretz newspaper, 15/8/2000{
