A leading British group opposed to science involving embryos reacted angrily on Wednesday after the government gave a research team permission to use human cloning for the purposes of medical research.
”It is very worrying indeed,” said Josephine Quintavalle, of the London-based group Comment on Reproductive Ethics.
”We have decisions of this magnitude being taken by an unelected government quango,” she said of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority after it granted a one-year licence to a team at Newcastle University in the north of Britain.
In order to produce stem cells cloned from human embryos, embryos are destroyed before they are 14 days old and never allowed to develop beyond a cluster of cells the size of a pinhead.
”No human life should be sacrificed for the benefit of anybody else, no matter how dramatic the promises are,” said Quintavalle.
”In this case it is only going to live for 14 days, but that is because we are only allowing it to live for 14 days.
”The pro-life position on the human embryo is that no matter how you created it, it is a human embryo, it is a member of the human species, and therefore it has as much right to life as anybody else.”
But scientists defend stem-cell research and promise it is entirely different from trying to make a cloned child, which is illegal in Britain.
”The goal we are trying to achieve is to help people who have got serious debilitating diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes … to potentially provide cures for them,” said Professor Alison Murdoch, head of the research team at Newcastle’s Centre for Life.
”We have got a lot of preliminary work to do and we are looking at five to 10 years before we can get to clinical trials,” she told BBC radio. ”But we are getting started now.”
”What we hope to do is, if you have one of these debilitating diseases, you come up to Newcastle, we take a small piece of skin from you, take a tiny cell from that, then we would reprogramme that cell not to be a skin cell but to be the sort of cell you need to cure your disease, such as a nerve cell,” she explained.
”Then we can inject that back into you and hopefully cure your disease. That cell would be genetically identical to you so [it] would not be rejected.” — Sapa-AFP
Licence granted for embryo cloning