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The Guardian profile: Alison Murdoch She is one of only two people in the UK who can legally clone human embryos. Her supporters have described her work as revolutionary. Her critics say her research merely gives false hope to desperate people Alok Jha Friday October 29, 2004 The Guardian The corridors of the United Nations headquarters in New York have been buzzing in the last week with a debate on human cloning that could determine the future direction of medical research for years to come. When delegates return in less than a fortnight, they will be asked to reach a conclusion on one of the most difficult ethical questions they have faced: should human cloning be banned? It is a heady subject. Many scientists see human cloning as an important step towards producing an unlimited supply of stem cells genetically identical to a patient. That in turn raises the possibility of curing a multitude of untreatable diseases. Pro-life groups say it simply devalues human life. At the centre of this ideological maelstrom stands Alison Murdoch, one of only two people in Britain who can clone human embryos legally. A fertility expert at the Centre for Life, an IVF clinic in Newcastle, she also heads the British Fertility Association and is an honourary clinical lecturer at the University of Newcastle. For decades she has helped women who would otherwise have found it difficult to conceive. But now she wants her work to go further and touch the edge of medicine: with her patients' consent, she will collect the unused eggs left over from fertility treatments and use them to clone human embryos for research. From these cloned embryos, her team of researchers want to extract stem cells, the body's master cells which have the ability to turn into any tissue. SOURCE: Guardian, UK http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1338727,00.html * * *Murray Charters <[log in to unmask]> Please change all address books to reflect this current address Parkinsons Resources on the WWWeb http://www.geocities.com/murraycharters ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn