The vote in Parliament extended the uses of embryos to include making embryonic stem cells for serious human disease. Most of cells needed would be taken from existing "spare" embryos from IVF treatments. The careless use of the word cloning to describe this caused much confusion, but it does point to an issue of concern. MP's did not have any chance to vote on the cloning of embryos, because it was technically legal due to a loophole in the Act. The present Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (1990) allows the creation of embryos for limited research purposes, mainly to do with infertility. On these grounds, the creation of cloned embryos has been forbidden, because this would be seen as reproductive cloning. By creating a new legal use for creating embryos for a non-reproductive use - to create stem cells - the Commons vote automatically allowed the cloning of embryos for this purpose, without ever voting on it. The influential European Commission ethical advisory panel reported on these issues in November 2000 and drew an ethical line at cloning embryos, as did a vote in the European Parliament. The UK vote should not be seen as a mandate to allow cloned embryos also, because this has not been put to a proper democratic test. We need early primary legislation on therapeutic as well as reproductive uses of cloning.
Cloned human embryos present several ethical problems. Firstly, it seems illogical to allow the creation of a cloned human embryo knowing full well one would have to destroy it on ethical grounds, because it was unethical to allow it to go to term to produce a cloned baby. The second objection is that this involves the deliberate creation of an embryo for other than reproductive purposes, although this is not specific to cloning. The use of "spare" embryos from fertility treatments would be a use of an embryo that would be destroyed anyway.
Thirdly, there is a gradualism argument. Once cloned human embryos were created, it would be much easier for someone misguided enough to go the next step and allow them to be implanted, or for someone rich enough to seek a clandestine "off-shore" treatment. This underlines the need for clear national laws, in those states which do not currently have them, to outlaw the practice of human cloning worldwide.
The creation and use of cloned human embryos should not be allowed as a general therapeutic procedure. We urge, however, that a priority should be put on nuclear transfer research which aims at avoiding use of embryos, by direct programming from one adult body tissue type to another. One could take, perhaps, a blood sample and reprogramme directly into becoming, say, a set of nerve cells. This is of course even more speculative than the methods discussed above, but several routes have recently been suggested. Ethically this would remove most of the above objections.
There is also a further reason. The ethics committee of Roslin's collaborators, the Geron Biomed company, has urged that the technique should have the widest applicability and not be simply a treatment for the rich. It is very unlikely that enough human donor eggs could ever be provided to treat the millions of potential patients across Europe. It would therefore probably be essential to find a method of producing replacement cells without using embryos. On present evidence, however, this would probably be impossible without some human embryo research to work out the method. This poses a deep ethical dilemma whether a very limited and fixed number of experiments should be allowed to obtain the data necessary to avoid any such use of embryos in future. Some would reluctantly argue for very limited research for this sole purpose, but if it seemed unlikely to succeed, then it should stop, and not proceed to use embryos routinely for cell therapies.
