Opponents of abortion have won a court victory in Britain that blows apart laws thought to control cloning. The High Court鈥檚 ruling means there is now no law preventing someone attempting to create a person through cloning, or to create tissues for transplant through so-called 鈥渢herapeutic cloning鈥�.
鈥淣ow, there are no criminal offences or anything to stop someone cloning a human,鈥� says Bruno Quintavalle of the Pro-Life Alliance, which brought the case. 鈥淪o if parliament wants to bring cloned embryos under any statutory governance, it needs to introduce primary legislation.鈥�
Sir Brian Heap, Vice-President of the Royal Society, agrees in part: 鈥淭he Government should ensure that the law explicitly prohibits human reproductive cloning.鈥� But he adds that any law should not prevent therapeutic cloning. 鈥淧arliament has signalled its approval for this and this should be respected,鈥� he says.
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In December 2000, parliament voted to legalise therapeutic cloning by altering the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990. At the same time, the government said it would introduce primary legislation specifically outlawing the creation of people through 鈥渞eproductive cloning鈥�.
Impatient at lack of progress, the Pro-Life Alliance decided to challenge the legality of altering the act to accommodate cloning. On Thursday, High Court judges agreed, saying that cloning cannot be governed by the act because of a legal technicality.
Egg and sperm
In the act, an embryo is legally defined as an egg fertilised by a sperm. The alliance successfully argued that a clone created through the 鈥渃ell nuclear replacement鈥� technique, used to create Dolly the sheep, is not an embryo according to this definition.
Instead, it is an egg emptied of its own genetic material fused with a complete cell from an adult. 鈥淭he new ruling says that legally, within the terms of the 1990 act, it鈥檚 not an embryo,鈥� says Quintavalle.
The upshot is that cloning experiments are no longer regulated by the Human Fertilisation Embryology Authority, which issues licenses for all experiments governed by the act.
However, the authority has not yet received any applications to do cloning experiments in any case. But the new ruling means that it has no legal powers to prosecute anyone who attempts such experiments without a license.
Growing potential
The government and the HFEA had argued unsuccessfully that a clone does qualify as an embryo because implanted into the womb, it has potential to grow into a new person.
鈥淲e argued that if it could become a human being, it must have been a human embryo,鈥� says a spokesman for the HFEA. 鈥淏ut apparently that鈥檚 not true now, so if it鈥檚 not a human embryo, what is it?鈥� he asked.
Quintavalle argues that there鈥檚 no proof yet that a cloned 鈥渆mbryo鈥� can become a human being, and so the case it is an embryo is not proven.
