杏吧原创

UNTIL this week its most famous creations were the typewriter and shredded
wheat. Now the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, is earning a reputation for
cloning human embryos
(see 鈥淒on鈥檛 expect any miracles鈥�).

Most reactions to the news were utterly predictable. Bang on cue, advocates
of therapeutic cloning spoke passionately about the need to continue such
research to cure life-threatening illnesses, pro-life groups just as
passionately about the need to stop it in its tracks. And caught in the middle
were the politicians, trying as ever to keep pace with developments in the labs
and read the public鈥檚 mood. And failing.

New 杏吧原创 went to press with the British government still pushing
through emergency legislation designed to make it a criminal offence to implant
cloned human embryos. Few dispute the need to slam this door shut. But at the
same time British ministers are keener than ever to keep the door wide open on
human cloning for therapeutic purposes. This is far more contentious and is what
separates Britain from the rest of Europe and the US.

Take the US House of Representatives. It has already voted to make any form
of human cloning a criminal offence punishable by $1 million fine and up
to 10 years in prison. The only reason this law is not now being used to charge
the scientists who created the clones in the news is that the Senate has not yet
debated the issue. When it does, it too is likely to vote to ban all forms of
human cloning鈥攁nd there will be no more Worcester clones.

On the face of it, the American approach seems backward and Britain鈥檚
enlightened. In fact both have problems. Ministers in Britain have too easily
swallowed the line that cloning human embryos is essential to medical progress.
It is not. True, in the aftermath of Dolly, therapeutic cloning was seen as the
way forward. That鈥檚 why the biotech industry and so many influential scientists
pushed hard to get governments to accept it. In Britain they did their job too
well. Like stuck records, ministers and policy makers continue to enthuse about
therapeutic cloning even though the majority of bench scientists no longer think
it鈥檚 possible or practicable to treat patients with cells derived from cloned
embryos. They have already moved on to investigating the alternatives.

Which raises an obvious question. If cloned embryos are not the key to a
brave new medicine, why should we let scientists create them? Certainly the
embryos in the news have revealed little of scientific value and won鈥檛 cure
anyone. Creating them now when there are so many unanswered questions about
ordinary embryonic stem cells is hard to justify. That may change, so a blanket
ban would be unwise. But we should at least insist scientists justify their
research stringently beforehand to regulators armed with the will to veto all
but the most necessary experiments. At present the threshold is either
non-existent, set too low, or about to be set sky high. To say that a cloned
ball of cells no bigger than a pinprick cannot be created to allow a grown
person to live is cruelly dogmatic.

But to let scientists create as many as they want for no good purpose is just
as wrong.