TROUBLED by the successful cloning of a sheep in Scotland, President Clinton has ordered a special panel to review the ethical implications of the breakthrough, the White House said yesterday.
"It's a very troubling subject," said the White House spokesman, Mr Michael McCurry, adding that Mr Clinton was prompted to action by "the very startling news from Scotland".
A scientific team from the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh has stunned the scientific world by cloning an adult sheep from a cell from a ewe's udder. The sheep, called Dolly, is now seven months old.
While US scientists have cloned mice and tadpoles from embryos, it was previously considered impossible to clone an adult animal because of the complexity of the organism.
Mr McCurry noted that in 1995, the president signed a ban on the use of federal funds for human embryo research and was now looking into whether further legislation was needed to curb private experimentation.
"The White House has asked the advisory commission to pursue that and make a judgment as to whether we really need to focus more clearly on the dimensions of this scientific, technical development, Mr McCurry said.
Cloning human beings is illegal in Britain but there are no laws against it in the US. The Bioethical Advisory Commission, which was established last year, is to carry out the review in 90 days but will not be issuing any concrete recommendations for legislation, Mr McCurry said.
In Britain, an ethical expert yesterday called for scientists to be more open about their work in cloning adult animals - as he received the first offer from a volunteer for any future human trials.
Dr Patrick Dixon, author of The Genetic Revolution, said that as it had taken more than half a year for the scientists at the Roslin Institute to announce their work - there was no way of knowing how far advanced current research by them and others was.
He is convinced it will soon be possible for the technique to be used somewhere to produce "man made" identical copies of adult humans - without the public knowing about the work until it has been finished.
Such work is illegal in Britain, but Dr Dixon said: "The lesson of history is that whatever can be done scientifically will be done by someone, somewhere at some time, especially when laws differ so widely from country to country."
One person, called Scott, contacted him today via an e-mail message to ask: "Do you need any volunteers for human cloning experiments?"
And a woman called Diane, who has previously said, she wanted to clone her dead father, has now indicated she wants to clone herself as well.
Dr Dixon called for an international summit on bio technology.
Dr Ian Wilmut, leader of the team which carried out the work at the Roslin Institute, dismissed Dr Dixon's worries out of hand.
Dr Wilmut said it was "unusually quick" in terms of scientific research for the team to have produced its results within seven months as many papers were not published for two years.
And he said there was no chance of the institute working on human cloning as this was "morally offensive" and illegal.
"What we are going on to do is to make precise genetic changes to livestock," Dr Wilmut said.