Britain Bans Cloning of Human Embryos for Research

The British government rejected expert advice Thursday and banned the cloning of human embryos for any kind of medical research, saying more time is needed to consider the implications.

The decision, announced in Parliament after months of deliberations, came as a surprise. The move means that embryos may no longer be cloned for infertility and congenital disease research.

The government had been expected to follow a recommendation by its advisors that Britain should allow continued research into the cloning of human embryos--provided they were destroyed after a maximum of 14 days--for the treatment of disease, while maintaining a ban on cloning to create babies.

In the United States, publicly funded embryo research is banned and in Germany and France it is not allowed at all.

The company that funded Dolly, the sheep whose 1996 birth marked the first cloning of a mammal from an adult cell, said Britain will fall behind in a key field.

“This work has the potential to provide completely new treatments for a wide range of diseases for which no remedy exists at present,” said Simon Best, managing director of Geron Bio-Med, owners of Scotland’s Roslin Institute.

“It’s a whole new market which could benefit the economy, and an area in which we are very smart at the moment,” he said.

British authorities have long banned cloning aimed at developing replacement tissue, as is allowed in the United States.

Public Health Minister Tessa Jowell said human reproductive cloning “is ethically unacceptable and cannot take place in this country.”

The government advisory body, the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, had recommended permitting cloning for therapeutic research, saying U.S. experiments in growing “master” cells of human tissues from an embryo have huge potential for medical treatment.

Researchers hope that the U.S. technique, by which any type of adult cell could theoretically be made, could lead to the creation of heart, kidney and other tissue to replace diseased parts of the body.

However, the technique theoretically could be used to clone a human being.