Britain Proposes Law Against Cloning of Humans

The British government moved Thursday to ease public fears about new gene technologies by announcing plans to outlaw human reproductive cloning and steps to prevent insurance companies from using genetic tests to limit coverage.

At the same time, genetic tests for diseases such as breast cancer are to be made more readily available through the National Health Service.

Health Secretary Alan Milburn said Britain must harness the benefits of gene technologies for health care and “jettison its downsides.”

“The genetics revolution has already begun. It is not going to go away,” Milburn told a meeting of scientists and doctors in the northern city of Newcastle. “Genetic advances can be a force for good, but that requires active preparation.”

He said current licensing restrictions are insufficient to ensure that human reproductive cloning--copying human beings--never occurs in Britain. New laws may also be necessary to prevent the creation of a “genetic underclass” by insurance companies seeking to exclude people with an inherited risk for certain diseases, he added.

“Human cloning should be banned by law, not just by license,” Milburn said.

Health Department officials said Britain stood to become the first country to make human cloning a criminal offense. However, they gave no timetable for the introduction of legislation, saying only that it would be in “the next available Parliament, when it can be fitted in.”

The announcement, coming ahead of a June 7 general election, could win the government favor with British voters, who overwhelmingly oppose cloning for the production of babies.

The government’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, the body that regulates genetic research, consulted the public on the issue in 1997 and found that the vast majority of experts and average Britons believed that human reproductive cloning should not be allowed. Subsequent polls have confirmed the public opposition, and no such research is licensed in the country.

The government does, however, support “therapeutic cloning” of human embryos to be used for research into the causes and treatments of diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. A law allowing such embryo research to go forward has passed both houses of Parliament, but its implementation has been held up by a court challenge from an anti-abortion group.

In January, a team of U.S., Italian and Israeli doctors announced plans to proceed with cloning children for infertile couples without submitting to ethical or scientific oversight by any government. They said more than 600 couples from the United States, Britain, Japan and elsewhere have asked to take part in the cloning effort.

The team is headed by Dr. Severino Antinori, an Italian fertility specialist known for helping women conceive in their late 50s and early 60s.

Richard Nicholson, editor of the London-based Bulletin of Medical Ethics, said he hopes that Britain’s proposal to ban human reproductive cloning will inspire other countries to follow suit.

“We need to make sure that places like Italy and the United States now take seriously the need to ban human cloning,” Nicholson said.

He said there has been “an awful lot of hype” about the benefits of genetic research and gene therapy but very little in the way of results.

Cloning is the process of creating a genetic twin by removing DNA from an egg cell and replacing it with DNA from the individual being copied. In 1997, the birth of Dolly the sheep marked the first time a mammal was created in this way. Since then, scientists have cloned other animals.

Ian Wilmut, the scientist who led the team that cloned Dolly in Scotland, denounced the group trying to clone a human, saying that for every successful birth of a cloned animal there have been many miscarriages and deformed offspring.

“There is no reason to believe that the outcomes of attempted human cloning will be any different,” he wrote last month in the U.S. journal Science. “Attempting to clone a human would be extremely cruel for the women and children involved, and there could be a backlash against valuable research into cloning to create cells for therapeutic purposes.”

On another issue, Health Secretary Milburn said the public would reject valuable genetic testing if it feared that the results would be passed on to insurance companies or potential employers.

“Many tests can only indicate an individual has a predisposition to develop a condition, not a certainty that they will,” he said. “Even so, forced disclosure of the test results could deter some people from taking tests at all, potentially putting their health at risk for fear of suffering discrimination.”