US groups oppose 'breakthrough'

The announcement that a Massachussetts firm has cloned a human embryo has provoked an outcry from the country's "pro-life" movement and is set to inject a new dynamic in a fiercely-contested Congressional debate about banning human cloning.

The firm's chief executive, Mr Michael West, has strongly defended his company's research and said their work was aimed not at creating a human being but at mining the embryo for stem cells to treat diseases from Parkinson's to juvenile diabetes.

However, President Bush yesterday made clear he believes the research was "bad public policy and morally wrong". "The use of embryos to clone is wrong," he told journalists at the White House. "We should not as a society grow life to destroy it."

Some scientists have also complained that the announcement by biotechnology company Advanced Cell Technology Inc. (ACT), based in Worcester, is premature because the firm failed to bring a cloned embryo to the point when valuable stem cells could be extracted. Stem cells can then be used to reproduce cells or organs identical to those from a donor's DNA, allowing the possibility to develop "designer" therapies that will not face rejection by the body's natural defences.

"It's a complete failure," said Dr George Seidel, a cloning expert at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. For a first attempt, he added, "they've progressed about as well as you'd expect, or slightly worse." Dr Steen Willadsen, a cloning pioneer in Windermere, Florida, said. "If one were to take a positive view of this, then one would say there are some problems with the approach they are taking - it hasn't worked." Dr Glenn McGee, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist, called the announcement "nothing but hype".

ACT concedes it has also been concerned to rush its announcement out to pre-empt a likely similar one by companies which may be explicitly trying to develop a human baby, an announcement which they fear would lead to a ban on all such research.

Advocates of the use of stem cell research distinguish between "therapeutic cloning" and "reproductive cloning", insisting that in the latter research the implantation of cloned embryos in the womb to produce a viable foetus is morally a qualitatively different kind of act. ACT insists it opposes reproductive cloning and wants to develop a public understanding of the difference in order to open the way for treatments of conditions such as Parkinson's and diabetes.

The distinction has split the "pro-life" movement in Congress with some prominent anti-abortion Republicans supporting limited therapeutic cloning.

But the religious organisations are adamantly opposed. "Some may call it a medical breakthrough. I believe it is a moral breakdown," the president of the National Catholic Alliance, Mr Raymond Flynn, said in a statement. The former Boston mayor and US ambassador to the Vatican warned that "human reproduction is now in the hands of men, when it rightfully belongs in the hands of God".

Several states have already banned human cloning and the House has already backed a ban on this type of research. The Senate has not yet taken up companion legislation, and several senators said they did not want to rush into legislation without understanding the scientific implications.

The Senate's Democratic Majority Leader, Mr Tom Daschle, told Fox News he supported cloning for research purposes, "but we vehemently oppose any cloning for purposes of human replication."

Meanwhile, a second company has claimed it had also cloned human embryos, but in unpublished research. That company, Clonaid, hopes eventually to clone human beings.