Human cloning is Dolly's debatable offspring

The dawning possibilities of human cloning raise unprecedented ethical and political dilemmas. Nowhere is the debate more intensive than in Britain, where the cloned sheep Dolly was created using a revolutionary technique.

In February 1997, when British scientist Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute outside Edinburgh announced that they had successfully cloned a sheep, Dolly, the news set off a global wave of concern about the possibilities of human cloning. In contrast, the reaction of government officials in Britain was one of satisfaction - bordering perhaps on complacency - that adequate preparations had already been made to address the full implications of cloning research.

As political leaders across the world spoke sternly of the need for an immediate global moratorium on such research, Britain was able to point out that human cloning - the creation of humans copied from other humans - was already banned under the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act, passed in 1990.

The 1990 Act does, however, allow research on human embryos up to 14 days old and in principle appeared to open the way for "therapeutic cloning" - the use of cloning techniques to develop a potential range of medical treatments such as organ and tissue replacement and repair.

But the mood changed in June this year, when the government refused to endorse a proposal from the respected regulatory body established by the act - the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority - to allow amendments to the legislation which would formally allow research into therapeutic cloning. The government said it needed more time to study the ethical implications of such amendments.

For Britain, the political dilemma is particularly acute. On the one hand, the cloning techniques developed by Wilmut and his colleagues have been hailed as a major scientific breakthrough whose broad potential medical applications promise to provide a major boost to the British economy, for example through licensing to companies across the world.

But with trust in government scientists already deeply scarred by the experience of bovine spongi-form encephalopathy (BSE, informally known as Mad Cow Disease), and further dented by concern over the potential health and environmental dangers of genetically modified crops, the government appeared reluctant to take further risks to its credibility by giving rapid approval to another "revolutionary" and controversial technology.

Copies of pop stars

There are few who would endorse the use of cloning technology to produce replica human beings to order. It is therapeutic cloning, with its enormous potential medical applications to humans, that is at the centre of most current controversy.

One possible application of therapeutic cloning could be the treatment of women whose mitochondrial DNA - the genetic material that provides energy to the cell - is damaged, and therefore risks passing this defect on to their children. Another is the ability to grow and graft skin in this way, which would replace the need for the current practice of using skin taken from another part of a patient's body. The same technique could be used to replace damaged bone or liver cells.

The problem, of course, is that the word cloning remains highly emotive, creating, as it does, visions of rich pop stars or autocratic dictators ordering up multiple copies of themselves. Critics argue that cloning represents the ultimate "instrumentalization" of a human being: treating one individual primarily as the means to gratify another, not as an end in himself or herself. They also argue that any attempt to distinguish between "reproductive cloning" and "therapeutic cloning" is largely semantic, and that giving the green light to the second will inevitably lead to the first.

But the distinction is seen as critical for those keen to realize the full medical potential of the cloning techniques. Among them is Wilmut himself, who has spent much of the past two and a half years talking about both the threats and the promises that his work has opened up, and now works as chief scientific officer for Geron Bio-Med, a company set up earlier this year jointly by the Roslin Institute and a U.S. biotechnology company, Geron, to exploit the potential of his work.

For Wilmut, like many others, the ethical threats of human cloning involve sensitive issues of human identity and social relationships, particularly within the family. "We can all imagine the type of issues that would arise if a cloned child were born into our own family," he says. "Just think, for example, of the difficulties for a child who fails to meet the expectations of its parents, which is quite likely given that personality is only partly the result of our genetic inheritance." But he also insists that the promises of cloning techniques, if responsibly used, remain enormous. "There is a large potential here for providing more effective treatment for a range of diseases, such as Parkinson's Disease, that are associated with damaged cells that do not have the ability to reproduce themselves." He acknowledges that the ethical dilemmas are difficult, adding: "We are keen to take part in any discussion that addresses them."

But attempts to win acceptance for therapeutic cloning research in the political arena have proved fraught with obstacles, primarily stemming from the political strength of anti-abortion groups, who remain deeply opposed to all forms of cloning.

This, for example, has already been the fate of attempts by the Clinton administration to introduce legislation in the United States that would simultaneously outlaw reproductive cloning while allowing embryo cloning for therapeutic purposes.

Sensitivities in the U.S. are high. Earlier this year, the National Institutes of Health announced that, despite being subject to a congressional ban on the use of federal funds for research on embryos, it had decided to sponsor work on stem cells obtained from embryos provided by the private sector, e.g., left over from fertility treatments. (Stem cells are undifferentiated cells from which specialized cells such as blood cells develop.) But congress is now moving to close this loophole.

The perspective of U.S. critics is close to that which has dominated legislative debates in mainland Europe - in particular in France and Germany - with its heavy emphasis on potential threats to human "dignity". Indeed it is this approach, combined with the view that human life begins at conception, that has led most European countries to ban not only attempts at human cloning, but all forms of embryo research.

'A moral black hole'

In contrast, the official British (and American) approach has, up to now, been more pragmatic, seeing the potential dangers of human cloning primarily in terms of the possible medical risks, such as uncertainty over long-term complications. But the UK government's new announcement appears to reflect an increased willingness to accept that other more explicitly "ethical" factors need to be taken into account.

This acknowledgment was immediately welcomed by religious lobby groups such as Christian Action Research and Education, whose director, Charles Colchester, was quoted in the London Times as urging the government to ensure that a new review body set up by the government to investigate human cloning techniques should consider what he described as the "gaping moral black hole" in such scientific research.

But this suggestion was widely criticized by researchers in the field. Robert Winston, for example, professor of fertility studies at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London, warned that many of Britain's "best scientists" may be tempted to leave the country to carry on their work if the government does not back down. "By confusing the cloning argument, the government is in danger of impeding one of the most significant medical advances of the decade," he said.

There was also criticism from those keen to see cloning techniques developed as a commercial activity. "British science is currently at the forefront of this emerging field," says John Sime, the chief executive of the Bioindustry Association, the professional organization for the UK biotechnology industry. "But it is a competitive one in which much is at stake, both for patients and the economy."

Some remain optimistic that research will receive the green light. "If the promises that have been made for these new techniques, in terms of the potential for treating degenerative diseases, are even half true, it would be immoral not to go ahead with the research," says Juliet Tizzard of the Progress Educational Trust, a group that lobbies in favour of research on reproductive technologies.

But this conclusion is far from assured, and the debate is far from over. The prospect of being able to produce identical copies of adult humans continues to hold enough fascination for some - and to be sufficiently distasteful for others - to ensure that, whatever the potential medical benefits from the less dramatic aspects of cloning research, its supporters face a difficult task in getting permission to proceed.

David Dickson, News editor of the international science journal Nature, and author of The New Politics of Science (University of Chicago Press, 1988)

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