Only a few days before Christmas British parliamentarians gave the green
light to extend  research using human embryos. According to the BBC
(December 19) the vote to relax the existing rules was a two-thirds
majority, with 366 members voting for the amendment and 174 against.

The justification for the measure is that cells can be taken at a very
early stage of development. Some scientists maintain that these
embryonic stem cells will revolutionize the treatment of diseases, such
as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. These stem cells can, in theory, be
persuaded to grow into any type of human tissue. They could be used, for
instance, to grow nerve cells to graft into the brains of Parkinson's
disease patients.

Given the widespread controversy over using embryos for experiments
members of parliament were given a free vote on the amendment to the
1990 Human Fertilization and Embryology Act. As it stood, the Act
permitted licensed research using human embryos only for strictly
limited purposes related to infertility, and for a limited period of 14
days.

The amendment extends the Act so that early-stage embryos can also be
used for research into non-congenital diseases. MPs did not have an
opportunity to vote on the related issue of limited human cloning, that
is, the creation of embryos with a genetic make-up identical to a living
adult for medical research. Unlike reproductive cloning, which  the
ruling Labour party has pledged to ban, the government says existing law
both permits and controls therapeutic cloning

Debate over the measure

Before the vote the Catholic archbishops of Westminster and Glasgow
wrote a letter to the Times (December 14) in which they expressed their
opposition to the government’s proposals. Archbishop Cormac
Murphy-O’Connor and Cardinal Thomas Winning pointed out that while "the
end, research into new treatments for disease using stem cells, is good
in itself, the means being proposed are quite immoral. To create and
destroy human lives simply to extract cells for research is wrong. Such
procedures use human lives as disposable objects."

But Church-based opposition to the amendments was not universal.
According to the Telegraph (December 3) just a short time before the
vote a briefing paper for the Church of England’s Board for Social
Responsibility dismissed fears that allowing scientists to create
embryos as part of research into new treatments for disease would be the
"slippery slope" towards cloning human beings.

The Board argued that such research "may be thought to be as morally
acceptable" as experiments on embryos to discover treatments for
infertility. While this report was not  official Church policy the
paper, written by Canon Dr John Polkinghorne, chairman of the Board's
Science and Medical Technology Committee, was said by the Telegraph to
"be highly influential".

Among those lobbying in favor of relaxing restrictions on the use of
embryos was the
British Medical Association. As the Times (December 19) noted the BMA
contacted all 659 MPs to urge them to back legislation allowing stem
cell research.

Dr Ian Bogle, chairman of the BMA, pointed out the potentially huge
benefit for thousands of people blighted with serious diseases. While,
according to the Times report, Dr Mike Dexter, the Wellcome Trust
Director, said that if Britain did not go ahead it risked a new "brain
drain" of scientists leaving the country to go abroad.

Meanwhile the BBC report quoted Peter Garrett, research director at the
anti-abortion charity Life, as saying that: "Firstly, to deliberately
create and destroy human life is dehumanizing to the scientists who
carry it out and the society that licenses it. "Secondly, once you open
the flood gates on the production of human cloned embryos, you are
setting up the preconditions for full pregnancy cloning.

During the debate in parliament, reported the Guardian (December 20),
many speakers pleaded for a vote in favor of extending research on the
basis of alleviating human suffering. The Minister for Public Health,
Yvette Cooper, stated that "There are immense potential benefits from
allowing this research to go ahead, particularly for those suffering
from dreadful chronic disease,".

However the prominent Tory Catholic and MP for Gainsborough, Edward
Leigh , brushed aside the Minister’s insistence that Britain was not on
the slippery slope to cloning humans. Leigh warned that science is
poised to "create a new cloned genetic blueprint for a human being which
will, if allowed, grow into a new human being unless it is destroyed".

Despite these pleas parliament approved the amendments and now the only
obstacle to their implementation would be a refusal by the House of
Lords to approve the government’s proposal. So far there are no definite
indications as to what will be the balance of votes in  the Lord’s on
this matter.

New laws in Australia and Japan

Apart from Britain both Australia and Japan have recently modified their
laws regarding embryos and medical research. As the Melbourne paper the
Age (December 14) reported the Australian federal parliament has passed
legislation to prohibit cloning whole human beings and to prohibit
placing human cells into animal eggs or placing a combination of animal
and human cells into a human uterus.

However, in a commentary on the new law, Nicholas Tonti-Filippini, an
expert in medical ethics, warned that the legislation, which was
formulated hastily and passed in procedural confusion in the early hours
of the morning after a marathon session, does not prohibit the formation
of a human embryo by somatic cell nuclear transfer to a human egg.

This latter technique, the same as that used to produce the cloned sheep
Dolly in Scotland three years ago is, in the opinion of Tonti-Filippini,
the most likely form of human cloning to be attempted for the purpose of
subsequently dismembering the three to four-day-old embryo to obtain
embryonic stem cells for use in medical research.

The ethical expert also identified some additional defects in the
legislation. The most serious of these being that  the government has
really prohibited only producing born human beings by cloning. It has
not prohibited forming human zygotes, embryos or fetuses by human
cloning.

In fact, notes Tonti-Filippini,  a government spokesman told the Senate
that the government supported therapeutic cloning, the intent of which
was to produce tissues and organs. As whole organs develop only within a
maturing foetus it would seem the Australian government is supporting
not only cloning human embryos but also their implantation in a woman
and later abortion to obtain organs from the foetus.

Shortly before the Australian changes Japan’s parliament voted in favor
of a measure to outlaw the cloning of human persons. According to
Associated Press (November 30) parliament passed a measure making the
cloning of humans a crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison or a
fine of $90,000.

The law, which prohibits creating human embryos by inserting somatic
cells into an unfertilized egg, is the first in Japan that penalizes a
specific kind of research, a parliament spokesman said.

The legislation, which also calls on the government to draft regulations
governing cloning technology, passed the upper house by a vote of
229-11. It passed the lower house earlier in November. The law also bans
mixing human and animal cells to create hybrid embryos and forbids
implanting hybrid embryos into human or animal mothers.