Britain allows cloning of human cells for research

The British government yesterday granted a team of scientists permission to begin cloning human cells, the first such license granted in the United Kingdom since the country declared cloning legal in 2001.

The team, funded by the government and based at Newcastle's Centre for Life, will try to create embryonic stem cells that are genetically identical to a healthy human donor, a technically difficult feat that has been done only once, by researchers in South Korea. If successful, the Newcastle team then wants to create stem cells genetically identical to donors with diabetes or other ailments, giving scientists a new way to study how those diseases develop.

"This is great," said Miodrag Stojkovic, a scientist at Newcastle University who is leading the team. "I believe this is the way we have to go if we want to cure these diseases."

The experiment will clone cells exclusively for medical research, not to create human children. Britain outlawed reproductive cloning at the same time it explicitly approved the use of cloning for scientific experimentation. In the United States, a bill to ban both applications of cloning passed the House last year but later stalled in the Senate, leaving the country without an official cloning policy.

The decision to license the British team is a reminder, scientists say, that as more scientists experiment with human cloning technology, the need for regulations in this country and elsewhere is becoming increasingly urgent.

The British decision also adds a twist to what has unexpectedly become one of the leading issues of the presidential campaign: embryonic stem cells. Because the British researchers plan to create embryos for the purpose of extracting new stem cells, their work would not be eligible for federal funding in the United States. No American scientists have announced specific plans to do what the British are doing, bolstering arguments made by Senator John F. Kerry and others that the United States is losing ground in a promising field of science.

At the same time, the announcement makes clear that embryonic stem cell research is more complex than often portrayed in campaign speeches. Many scientists say that research will require creating cloned embryos -- crossing a boundary that could make voters uneasy.

"We are talking about creating human embryos for the purpose of harvesting their parts," said Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee.

Embryonic stem cell research is controversial in this country because scientists must destroy an embryo several days into its development to extract and grow the stem cells. These stem cells have the unique potential to become any cell in the body, offering scientists insights into how diseases work, but critics charge that the process constitutes the taking of a human life.

President Bush, who in 2001 said the government would not support any research on newly created embryonic stem cells, has said that he opposes the creation of cloned embryos for any purpose. Kerry has said he supports the use of cloning to create embryos for scientific research, but opposes its use to create cloned babies.

The experiments that will be done at Newcastle University use a technique known as "nuclear transfer" as a specialized way of creating human embryonic stem cells, which are now usually obtained from discarded fertility-clinic embryos. From one donor, Stojkovic and his colleagues will take a skin cell and then extract the nucleus, which contains the cell's genetic instructions. Then they will remove the nucleus from a human egg cell, taken from a different donor, and replace it with the nucleus from the donor skin cell. The egg, now with the skin cell's DNA, will then grow into an embryo. After several days the embryonic stem cells will be removed, destroying the embryo.

From this research could come important scientific advances, proponents argue. The team hopes, for example, to create embryonic stem cells from a donor who has juvenile diabetes, a life-threatening condition in which the body loses its ability to produce insulin. The scientist could then follow these embryonic stem cells as they develop into the cells of the pancreas, where insulin is produced, perhaps revealing a point in development when something goes wrong.

The same approach could be used to study a wide range of diseases in a way they cannot currently be studied, scientists say.

The controversy about nuclear transfer has become heightened because several groups outside the scientific mainstream have declared that they intend to use the technique to create a cloned baby. Based on the experience of cloning animals, most scientists believe that reproductive cloning would be very difficult and that such a child would have serious and unpredictable health problems, even if it survived.

In Britain, reproductive cloning would carry heavy penalties under the 2001 law.

This fall, the United Nations is expected to reconsider a measure, supported by the Bush administration, that would ban both applications of human cloning. Around the world, some countries are choosing to ban the use of cloning technology with human cells for any purpose, while others are encouraging its use as a tool in scientific discovery.

"We are seeing the first few raindrops of a coming storm," said Dr. Leonard Zon, a scientist at Children's Hospital in Boston and president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.

Gareth Cook can be reached at cook@globe.com. For more stem cell coverage, see boston.com/news/science.