This is hypocrisy” “” “

Ian Wilmut, of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, the scientist who cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996, obtained a licence from the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (Hfea), the British regulatory authority, on 8 February, to clone human embryos for therapeutic purposes as part of a research project on diseases that attack the motoneurons, the nerve cells that control our movements. Cloning for therapeutic purposes has been legal in the UK since 2001 and this is the second time that the Hfea has granted such a licence. The first was granted several months ago to the researcher Miodrag Stojkovic of the Institute of Human Genetics of the University of Newcastle. The authorization to Wilmit has aroused a good deal of controversy in pressure groups campaigning for the safeguard of the right to life, according to which the cloning of the human embryo, albeit for therapeutic purposes, implies the creation and successive destruction of a human life. “RESEARCH MUST NOT KILL”. Research ought to be conducted with methods that do not kill or exploit the human being” is the curt answer of Helen Watt, director of the Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics (www.linacre.org) in London, the only Catholic centre of bioethics in the UK and Ireland, in reacting to news of the licence to clone human embryos for therapeutic purposes given by the Hfea to Ian Wilmut, of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, as part of a research project on motoneurons. “Professor Wilmut – explained the director of the Centre to SIR – wishes deliberately to clone human embryos affected by motoneuron disease. The embryos will be created and killed for their cells, which will then be studied by Prof. Wilmut’s staff”. “Such a licence – she adds – was already granted by the HFEA to researchers at Newcastle. It is incredible that this kind of experiment can be permitted in a country that claims to be civilized. The research – concludes Helen Watt – ought to be conducted with methods that do not kill or exploit the human being, such as research on adult stem cells, which are already producing good results in terms of medical treatment”. “HYPOCRITICAL DECISION”. “Any licence to clone and kill strikes at the very heart of the fundamental law on which our society rests, which is not to kill innocent beings”, says Anthony Ozimic, spokesman of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, one of the most important organizations of the pro-life movement in the UK, in condemning the licence to clone human embryos for therapeutic purposes given to Prof Ian Wilmut. “The cloning process – he told Sir – kills many innocent human embryos in the most vulnerable moment of their existence. All those killed are unique human beings that it is impossible to replace”. According to Ozimic, “it is pure hypocrisy for the Human Fertilization and Embriology Authority to speak of the unique moral status of the embryo when it is this same agency that is authorizing the licence to kill such embryos”. “So-called therapeutic cloning – he added – exploits human beings and uses them as resources rather than respects them as persons. As Dr. Harry Griffin, who assisted Dr. Wilmut to create Dolly the sheep, has himself admitted: ‘Therapeutic cloning is certainly not therapeutic for the embryo'”. “Over two decades of destructive research on the embryo – Ozimic concluded – have produced none of the cures that its promoters prophesied would have been found, whereas research on adult stem cells is already providing responses to neurological conditions such as dysfunctions to the motoneuron system. Research on adult stem cells makes human cloning futile”. HOW DOES CLONING TAKE PLACE? With the licence of the HFEA, Prof. Wilmut and his assistants, Paul de Sausa of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, and Christopher Shaw of King’s College in London, are authorized to clone cells of patients affected with diseases of the motoneuron to study how these develop in the embryo. It is believed the researchers will remove DNA from the skin and blood of subjects carrying the disease and implant it in a human egg cell whose genetic code has been removed. After the egg cell has been transformed into an embryo, the scientists will remove from it some cells with the aim of studying them to understand better the dynamic of how these diseases develop. The embryos will be destroyed on the sixth day of development, i.e. when they reach the stage of blastocysts, the level of embryonal development that precedes the moment in which the embryos can be implanted in the uterus.