A BILL to explicitly ban human cloning in Britain was rushed into Parliament
this week after an embarrassing legal defeat for the government had left cloning
regulations in tatters.
The government says it will also spell out measures to regulate 鈥渢herapeutic
cloning鈥�, the growing of new organs from cells cloned from a patient鈥檚 own
tissue.
The existing rules were plunged into disarray last week after a challenge by
the Pro-Life Alliance, which opposes abortion, exposed a legal irregularity. The
case, heard in the High Court, centred on the legal status of embryos formed by
鈥渃ell nuclear transfer鈥�, the procedure by which Dolly the cloned sheep was
created. In this technique, an embryo is created either by fusing a mature cell
from a donor with an egg emptied of its own DNA, or by injecting the
DNA-containing nucleus from a mature cell into a denucleated egg.
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In December last year, Parliament voted to alter the Human Fertilisation and
Embryology Act of 1990 to cover cloned embryos. But the act defines an embryo as
a fertilised egg, and the Pro-Life Alliance successfully argued in court that a
cloned embryo doesn鈥檛 conform to this definition because no fertilisation takes
place. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not an egg fertilised by sperm, so as far as the act is concerned,
it鈥檚 not an embryo,鈥� says Bruno Quintavalle, a spokesman for the alliance.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which licenses all
embryology experiments covered by the act, was aghast. 鈥淥ur advice is that if it
could become a human being, it must be a human embryo, but apparently that鈥檚 not
true,鈥� says a spokesman.
The ruling doesn鈥檛 affect licences allowing researchers to extract embryonic
stem cells from spare IVF embryos donated by parents. 鈥淭he ruling won鈥檛 affect
what we do,鈥� says Peter Andrews, a stem cell researcher at the University of
Sheffield.