The Department of Health has announced that new legislation to ban reproductive cloning will be introduced in Parliament next week. Speaking on Friday, the Secretary of State for Health, Alan Milburn, said that there will be a bill with the specific and singular intention of making reproductive cloning a criminal...
The ProLife Alliance last week succeeded in its quest to point out a so-called 'loophole' in the law that fails to prohibit human reproductive cloning. In a High Court ruling, the claim made by the organisation that human embryos created by cell nuclear replacement (CNR) are not protected by the...
The Royal Society has urged the British government to consider setting up a bank of frozen human stem cells, in a report submitted this week to the expert panel on therapeutic cloning. The panel, headed by Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson, is currently considering the scientific, ethical and legal issues...
Public hostility to human reproductive cloning may be based on an 'illogical and transient fear of a new technology', according to a British Medical Association (BMA) discussion paper presented at this week's World Medical Association meeting in Tel Aviv. If the cloning method of cell nucleus replacement were eventually to...
Genetic analysis of Dolly the sheep's cells has revealed that the genes in her mitochondria - the powerhouses of cells - have come from another sheep involved in the cloning experiment. In the cloning technique of cell nucleus replacement, a donor cell nucleus is fused with a donor egg stripped of its...
Cloned human embryos have been produced by two US biotechnology companies during research aimed at developing tissue transplant therapies, according to a number of reports in the mainstream UK press last week. The California-based Geron Corporation, which effectively bought the right to use the cloning technology developed at the Roslin...
Two prominent science bodies in Australia have delivered similar recommendations on the regulation and ethics of human cloning. Both the Australian Academy of Science and the Human Genome Project (HUGO) recommend that reproductive cloning be prohibited, whilst supporting therapeutic cloning under ethical guidelines, peer review and public scrutiny. The academy...
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