IF THE American fertility doctor Panayiotis Zavos is to be believed, he is just weeks away from implanting the first cloned human embryo in the womb of a surrogate mother. Zavos has told journalists that the embryo is stored somewhere in the Middle East where a secret team of experts has spent months practising with cow eggs. Could this be a genuine covert cloning programme, or is it a publicity stunt?
Whatever the answer, complacency would be a bad idea. Sooner or later someone with the necessary skills and resources will be attracted by money or fame to demonstrate that reproductive cloning is feasible. Seven years after Dolly the sheep, would-be baby cloners have become a real worry. The international community, through the UN, should be sending out the clearest possible signal about the dangers of reproductive cloning.
Yet that message is not being sent. The sticking point is that some countries, notably the US and the Vatican, want a global ban on both therapeutic and reproductive cloning, while others want to ban only reproductive cloning. While the impasse continues, the UN appears weak and divided on the issue.
Advertisement
So what is the way forward? First, let me declare an interest. As a cell biologist and a researcher in stem cell medicine I have glimpsed for myself the medical potential of nuclear transfer. This, the core technique used in creating Dolly, involves stripping an egg of its own genetic material and using it to 鈥渞eprogram鈥� an adult cell so it can begin the developmental process all over again.
It may turn out that therapeutic cloning will prove unsustainable as a method for producing tissues for grafting into patients, because of the need to access large numbers of human eggs. But even then, our only chance of discovering alternative methods of generating stem cells suitable for grafting will be to investigate the genetic reprogramming that takes place inside eggs during the early stages of the cloning process. The governments pressing for a global ban on therapeutic cloning are in my view misguided: each country should be free to set its own laws on this research.
Reproductive cloning is an entirely different matter. In recent years we have seen a crop of papers from animal cloners cataloguing the health risks involved. In light of these, the overwhelming majority of experts worldwide, myself included, believe that reproductive cloning of humans should be off limits everywhere. The question is how this can best be achieved, given the present impasse at the UN.
The approach that I, along with many of my colleagues, advocate is to make reproductive cloning a crime against humanity. We have lent our support to an organisation called the Genetics Policy Institute (GPI), which last month submitted legal documents that state the case for classifying reproductive cloning as a crime against humanity. The GPI is calling on the UN to seek a ruling on the matter from the International Court of Justice.
A number of legal grounds can be cited in favour of such a declaration. For instance, the famous Nuremberg code of ethics, drafted in 1947 following the horrific experiments carried out by the Nazis in concentration camps, states: 鈥淣o experiment should be conducted where there is a prior reason to believe that a death or disabling injury will occur.鈥� The code also states that 鈥渢he degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved in the experiment鈥�.
Some may consider this proposal disproportionate or even draconian. But the fact is that plain moral outrage has so far failed to stop the posturing of the baby cloners, and it is clearly risky to continue to rely on the inefficiency of cloning as the main barrier to it being done. The outcome of animal experiments suggests that it will probably take 300 or more human eggs to obtain a single cloned pregnancy. If 20 or 30 women were sufficiently well paid, they might well donate the required number of eggs.
Others might worry that placing reproductive cloning in the same moral bracket as terrible war crimes risks devaluing the term 鈥渃rime against humanity鈥�. They should remember that reproductive cloning itself is likely to have terrible consequences. Judging from the biology of animal clones, any fetus produced is likely to be abnormal and fail to develop to term. And any babies that do go to term and survive birth would face the prospect of living with some potential life-threatening abnormality. And for what purpose?
There are only three reasons for attempting to clone someone: narcissism, infamy or the misguided belief that it can be used to treat sterility. The entire scientific community should join the GPI in calling for it to be banned. A clear line needs to be drawn between reproductive cloning and the genuine investigation of medical benefits of other studies on nuclear transfer. Time is running out.