Cloning: Case for sensible use

A sensible consensus seems to be emerging among legislators, regulators and scientists in the UK: that hasty action to ban human cloning is unnecessary because there is no prospect of anyone doing any such thing in the near future.

Existing legislation should be reviewed to make sure that experiments to produce cloned people do not take place (there is some legal doubt about whether the 1990 Human Fertilization and Embryology Act covers cloning from adult cells) but cloning research should be permitted under rigorous regulatory scrutiny.

There are several reasons why scientists might want to carry out such research, without dreaming of cloning a whole human being.

An obvious one is to provide a new source of transplant tissues and organs, from skin to kidneys, that would be genetically identical to the recipient and therefore unlikely to be rejected.

This would require the creation of embryonic cloned cells, which would be induced to develop into specific tissues rather than a complete foetus.

-- Financial Times