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Electronic Telegraph - UK News ISSUE 2217 Wednesday 20 June 2001 World ban 'the only way to stop baby cloning' By Roger Highfield, Science Editor NOTHING short of a worldwide ban on human reproductive cloning will prevent risky and unethical attempts to create duplicate babies, Britain's most eminent academic body said yesterday. An international moratorium is "the only way to reduce the chances of such experiments being carried out in other countries", said the Royal Society. But the report to peers said that such a ban must ensure therapeutic cloning research aimed at developing new treatments was not jeopardised. Earlier this year Prof Severino Antinori, of an infertility unit in Rome, praised "Tony Blair's intelligent decision" to allow research into therapeutic cloning, the creation of cloned embryos to grow a patient's tissue, and said that it would aid his efforts to create a human clone within two years. The society's report acknowledged this was the case but said that a ban on therapeutic cloning in Britain would not prevent foreign reproductive cloning but would hamper the development of powerful new treatments. It was produced at the society's evidence to the House of Lords ad hoc committee on stem cell research. Stem cells, which hold the key to the ability to grow a patient's own tissue for repair, are central to the cloning debate. Potentially they could be used to create unlimited supplies of replacement tissue, including nerve, bone, skin and heart muscle, for repairing injuries and for treating disease. Stem cells can be found in adult tissue but the most promising kind, according to many scientists, are found in early human embryos when they consist of only 100 or so cells. Cloning offers a way to grow a patient's own stem cells but, by perfecting such technology, scientists could accelerate efforts to conduct so-called reproductive cloning. Prof Richard Gardner, who chaired the working group which prepared the report, said: "When scientists talk about the possible benefits of human reproductive cloning, such as replacing a beloved child or partner lost in an accident, they betray wholly unrealistic expectations about the outcome. While a clone is likely to bear a striking physical resemblance to the original, the two will differ at least as much as identical twins in terms of personality and other higher mental attributes." http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000140326706927&rtmo=LSLttddd&atmo=LSLttddd&pg=/et/01/6/20/nclon20.html ************ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn