Human clone research continuing in private despite US funding ban

There will be virtually no controls on human cloning activity if it follows the pattern set by the use of reproductive technology, delegates to the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting have been warned.

"It is a kind of Wild West for people using reproductive technology," said Dr Art Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania. It was a "free market" situation and there was "absolutely no control or societal steering of this particular ship".

He and other specialists, including Dr Ian Wilmut, the creator of Dolly the cloned sheep, yesterday discussed the rights and wrongs of cloning humans. There had been much talk about cloning humans for organs or to overcome infertility, Dr Caplan said. The public did not understand what the technology was about and it obscured a more important question: "Is it good for the clone?". For example, a clone would know - on the basis of the person who supplied the tissue - when he was going to go bald or die of some particular cancer at 58. "The clone will know a lot more" about his own future, Dr Caplan said.

Dr Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh opposed cloning as a reproductive technology. "The relationship between the child and the parent would be bound to be disturbed," he suggested. Yet the technology held promise as a way to overcome human illness.

His method was based on taking the nucleus from a donor's cell, transferring it into an egg cell and encouraging it to begin dividing as in conception. This nuclear transfer process could be used to prevent illnesses that arise from abnormalities in the substances, including mitochondrial DNA, inside the cell but outside its nucleus.

Efforts are also under way to treat illnesses by "obtaining cells from the patient himself" through cloning. "In principle that seems to be a desirable use of this technology," Dr Wilmut said. "This is one of the ethical choices that each society should make." Each society would have to decide what it would or would not accept as appropriate.

Dr Glenn McGee, assistant professor of bio-ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said he agreed with arguments calling for a temporary moratorium on human cloning experiments at least until controls could be crafted to establish what was acceptable. The question, he suggested, was: "What happens after a five-year moratorium ends?".

"We have to have a policy for thinking about cloning and advanced reproductive technology," he said. The rights of cloned children must also be established. In this regard legal experts are examining the possibility of applying existing adoption laws to protect the rights of clones. Adoption law may offer a way forward, he said. It already had a role in protecting children coming into unorthodox family structures.

Dr Lori Andrews of the Kent School of Law in Chicago discussed the inadequacies of laws on cloning. "Despite President Clinton's executive order preventing the use of federal funds in human clone research, much research not dependent on these funds continues. The current laws don't get at the things that bother us about cloning," she suggested.

There would also be legal confusion, she said. If a man cloned himself, was the resultant offspring his child or his brother? If DNA tests were used as evidence they would show the child had the same parents as the man, making them brothers. Human cloning was made illegal in California, Dr Andrews said, but the laws did not cover current activities which involved transferring mammalian cell nuclei into cow eggs.

Eight US states ban cloning which produces an identical human, but a clone using Dr Wilmut's technology would be outside this because of mitochondrial DNA taken up after transfer, which makes the clone slightly different from the original.