Pro-life campaigners and anti-cloning scientists in Britain have reacted angrily to a report published yesterday which recommends the cloning of human embryos for research to find cures for degenerative conditions such as Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. The joint report by the Human Genetics Advisory Commission (HGAC) and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), presented to the government, firmly rejects the idea of cloning human beings as an alternative to human reproduction but calls for the development of "therapeutic treatment" using early-stage embryos. If, as the anti-cloning lobby suspects it will, the government accepts the recommendations early next year, it says the cloning of whole human beings would become a reality.
The report calls on the government to introduce explicit legislation banning human reproductive cloning.
Clearly horrified by the proposals, Mr Peter Garrett, the research director of the anti-abortion group, Life, said the report promoted "technological cannibalism" in which the victims were the living members of society. "Therapeutic cloning will be the first step towards producing full-term cloned babies . . . Therapeutic cloning is even worse because it involves the deliberate creation and destruction of human beings," he said.
An anti-cloning campaigner, Dr Patrick Dixon, predicted that scientists would use advances in British technology to "steam ahead" with cloning whole human beings. He said scientists, such as Dr Richard Seed in the US, who hopes to open a cloning research clinic in Japan, would soon achieve their goal of implanting cloned embryos into a womb to produce fully-formed human clones.
The scientists and ethicists at the HGAC and the HFEA produced their report following a consultation period earlier this year during which the majority of respondents made it clear that they were opposed to human reproductive cloning.
The report does, however, propose a change to the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act to allow cloning of human embryos up to 14 days old to assist the development of therapeutic treatments for diseased or damaged tissues or organs. Under current legislation embryos less than 14 days old may be used for medical research but only in strictly controlled areas such as fertility treatment and research into congenital diseases and gene abnormalities.
It is hoped that the technique, which follows research in the US where scientists have isolated and developed cultures of human stem cells, a group of cells that have the potential to grow into any organ in the body, might be used to grow replacement tissues for transplant operations.
One of the advantages of the technique is that the body will not reject the cloned cells, and it is predicted that the first licence for replacement tissue research could be granted within a year of a change of the law.
The chairman of the HGAC, Sir Colin Campbell, said the new treatments would not involve human reproductive cloning and insisted any such proposal was "morally repugnant". He also ruled out the possibility of cloning spare parts but said it might be possible to clone skin to treat burns or diseased parts of the body.
However, Dr Donald Bruce, director of the Church of Scotland's society, religion and technology project, calling for a wider public debate on the issue, said many Christians would have ethical difficulties with embryos being used in "spare-part factories".