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Kirk Updates Position on Embryo Stem Cell Therapies A multi-disciplinary working group of the SRT Project has produced a report on human stem cell research and embryology, which was debated at the Church of Scotland General Assembly on 23 May 2006. It assessed the scientific developments in adult and embryonic stem cells and cloning, in the context of case studies on their potential use to treat Parkinson's, Huntington's and and motor neurone diseases, diabetes and blood disorders. The report warns against overclaiming the potential of different approaches, which are mostly far from therapeutic application. It re-examines the complex issue of the moral status of the human embryo, recognising the differences of view within the Church. The Assembly agreed with the report's main conclusions : It also urges the Government not to relax the present regulations governing embryo research in forthcoming legislation. Church of Scotland Reponse on the review of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act On 5 December 2005, the Church of Scotland has made a detailed response to this important review of the legislation governing a wide range of issues including assisted reproduction, genetic selection, embryo research and stem cells. It is made by the Church and Society Council and the SRT Project which is a part of the Council, and draws on the ongoing work of the Project in ethical debates on cloning and stem cells. |
Other Recent Articles on Cloning and Stem Cells |
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Animal-Human Hybrid Cloned Embryos are Unethical and Unnecessary
While the Church of Scotland welcomes the decision by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to have a full public consultation on whether to license research on human-animal hybrid embryos, it considers that using animal cells to create hybrid cloned embryos breaches moral limits and is too speculative to justify exaggerated claims being made for it in some parts of the scientific community. See our Press Release Should EU or US taxes fund Embryo Stem Cell research?
Using Cloning to do Germline Therapy Raises Major Ethical Problems
Kirk View on Stem Cell Research : Correcting Press Reports
Rabbit-Human Hybrid Cloned Embryos
Technical fixes may not solve Embryo Stem Cell ethical problems
Therapeutic Cloning Claims are Misleading the Public
Commons Committee Embryo Report Ethically Naive and Disturbing
Ethical Problems with Roslin Cloned Embryo Research Decision
Cloned Embryos - Demystifying the Issues
Cloned Embryo Research premature and could lead to abuse
SRT information sheets downloadable as Acrobat PDF Files
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Cloning : Dolly was the most famous sheep in the world. She looked much like any other sheep, but she was been cloned from another adult sheep. Inside every cell, her genetic make up was the same as a ewe of a different generation. Scientists at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh rewrote the laws of biology, which has become the focus of an unprecedented media circus as a result.
And, if you believe some of the press hype, for opening a Pandora's box of consequences with some very disturbing ethical and social implications. But are we just getting steamed up about science fantasies, or is there really something we should rightly be worried about? And what is all this research really for?
Stem cells : In 1998, American scientists extracted stem cells from human embryos and have been able to keep them in "cell lines" which can in principle be converted into any type of body cell. The claim is this could result in revolutionary therapies for degenerative diseases which are otherwise untreateable. It would take many years to establish whether the scientific dream really would become a threapeutic reality, but it also has a serious and fundamental ethical questions about the nature and moral status of the human embryo and research with embryos.
In our opinion while all the media attention focused too much on speculations about human cloning, which may never happen, it largely lost sight of the fact that we already can clone animals which raises important ethical questions also. These are explored in our paper Should we Clone Animals?.
In same edition of the scientific journal Nature in July 1998 that confirmed that Dolly was real, and another article announced that researchers in Hawaii had cloned mice. This greatly opens up the possibilities for worldwide cloning research, but also presents potential problems. We discuss the implications in our brief article Cloned Mice - Is the sky now the limit for cloning? Mice are easier to handle and have been used to investigate whether cloning affects the factors which control ageing. Recent experiments showed that cloned mice die much younger than ordinarily mated mice. This needs to be followed up with further studies but it raises a major question about the cloning process.
As the range of animals which has been cloned has increased, so the reasons for doing attempting it have become more improbable. Cloning to preserve an endangered species of cow did not succeed, might be a laudable if unlikely objective. Cloning a cat to "restore" a lost pet surely makes reproductive science look ridiculous, see Cloned Cat is Cute but Ethically Unacceptable.
We first commented on the idea of producing chimeric embryos in December 1998 as part of a general reponse on animal cloning issues to the report of the UK Farm Animal Welfare Committee on animal cloning and animal welfare. Our comments were made in the light of the announcement the previous month (November 1998) by Advanced Cell Technologies in Worcester, Mass, USA, claiming that they had produced cloned embryos by fusing cow eggs and human cells. The idea of using cow's eggs instead of human eggs was to proposed as a way to overcome ethical objections to embryos because the resulting entities would be non-viable. Some leading scientists doubted that ACT had achieved what they had claimed, but the general idea behind it received sympathetic reaction at the time from President Clinton's advisory group on bioethics. We considered that it did not taken the ethical problems surrounding admixture of animal and human reproductive cells or the status (as opposed to the viability) of the embryo seriously enough.
Human - Cow Nuclear Transfer
We commented again in our submission in October 1999 to the Donaldson committee (chaired by the UK Chief Medical Officer) investigating the scientific potential and ethical issues of embryonic stem cells.
An alternative means to the same end [of producing human cells in regenerative medicine], but one with perhaps equally problematical ethics, is to produce non-viable human embryos within cow's eggs. This arose out of the failure of Neal First's trans-species nuclear transfer to produce viable embryos from different animal cells, mentioned in the previous section. The idea mooted by Advanced Cell Technologies is to take a human cell and perform a nuclear transfer into a denucleated cow's egg. Passing an electric current would fuse the two and stimulate the human cell to divide as though it were a human embryo, but one which was not viable.4 At the blastocyst stage of division, the stem cells would be removed and cultured as human somatic cells. Aside from the formidable technical problems, one would need to be quite sure that the use of a cow's egg as a host for the human cell had no adverse effect on the eventual human cell lines. This is the opposite way round to the interspecific quandaries of xenotransplantation, but it is also arising in a number of other areas, such as suggestions of growing human sperm in rats. Ethically this would avoid one problem - the creation of a human embryo which could otherwise go to term - but create another, in mixing genetic material across species at such a profound level, which as argued above would seem to raise major intrinsic objections.
In its report of August 2000, the Donaldson Committee concluded that "the use of eggs from a non-human species to carry a human nucleus was not a realistic or desirable solution to the lack of human eggs for research." The UK Government responded in a statement that
"the mixing of human adult (somatic) cells with the live eggs of any animal species should not be permitted. Primary legislation to give effect to this recommendation will be brought forward when the Parliamentary timetable allows. In the meantime the Government calls on bodies funding research to make it clear that they will not fund or support research involving the creation of such hybrids."
The SRT Project wrote a special Report on Cloning to the Church of Scotland's 1997 General Assembly which was passed on May 22 by the church's highest body. A motion was passed calling on the UK Government to take steps to ensure that the routine cloning of animals in meat and milk production is not allowed, while giving support to the work of the Roslin Institute in genetic modification of sheep and other farm animals to produce therapeutic proteins in milk. It passed a motion opposition to the cloning of human beings, while leaving open for the time being possible research uses of cloning technology, which are discussed below. This was further confirmed by the 2001 General Assembly.
SRT has written extensively on the subject. A recent example was at the invitation of the Economic and Social Research Council for an opinion piece for its in-house magazine The Edge on why human cloning is ethically wrong, as one half of a debate. This was described in the editorial as 'debate at its very best'.
For an overview see the updated SRT information sheet Embryonic and Adult Stem Cells: Ethical Dilemmas covering stem cells, the status of the embryo, the prospects or otherwise for adult stem cells, therapeutic uses of cloning, and the legislative challenges. The major issues are set out in more detail in a discussion paper of the Conference of European Churches working group on BioethicsStem Cells and Embryonic Cloning, of which SRT did the main drafting.
SRT's Director Dr Donald Bruce has been much involved with the emerging European discussion and presented a paper Stem Cells and Cloning - Medical Potential and Ethical Dilemmas at the European Commission's major Conference "Stem Cells: Therapies for the Future?", 18-19 December 2001, Brussels. We also discuss Stem Cells : Are Adult or Placental Cells a Viable Alternative to using Embryos? attempting to clear up some of the confusion over claims and counter claims whethe embryonic stem cell research is necessary or not.
SRT was present when Korean scientists presented their now discredited detailed results of the first cloned human embryos at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle in January 2004. SRT has been prominent in the subsequent debate on therapeutic applications of stem cells derived from cloned embryos, with a number of TV and radio interviews, including being a panellist in a special BBC Newsnight debate on 16 December 2004 entitled "If Cloning could Cure Us." A Newcastle group has claimed a cloned human embryo up to a few cells, as did ACT several years before. But it is currently not clear that anyone has got a means to produce cloned human embryos up to the crucial blastocycst stage.
The issues were discussed in SRT's Supplementary Report on Cloned Human Embryos to the 2004 General Assembly and are now the subject of a working group which hopes to submit a report to the May 2005 Assembly. Many of the questions raised in that 2004 report became reality within last summer when first a Newcastle group and then Roslin Institute applied to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) for licenses to create cloned human embryos for stem cell research. SRT has corresponded several times with the HFEA on these issues, and spoke at its annual conference in September 2003.
We have produced several press releases on these developments :
We also commented on earlier premature claims for cloned human embryos :
Cloned Embryos and Parthenogenesis and Cloned Human Foetus Claim Unlikely
SRT has been involved with the emerging discussion from the outset. It took part in a consultation exercise of the Human Embryology Authority (HFEA) and Human Genetics Advisory Commission (HGAC) on the potential medical uses of cloning technology. On 8 December 1998, they reported the results of this consultation. Our immediate response to the report "Cloning Issues in Reproduction, Science and Medicine" was given in a short press release Cloning Human Embryos for Spare Tissues - an Ethical Dilemma.
In summer 1999, the UK Government set up the Donaldson Committee to examine these issues. In October 1999 SRT and the Board of Social Responsibility of the Church of Scotland made a more substantial submission of our ethical concerns about Human Embryonic Cloning to this committee. We expressed deep concern about proposals to clone human embryos which would be used not for reproduction but as a source of replacement tissues, and call for a much wider public debate of this controversial issue before making its mind up. Need for Wider Public Debate on Therapeutic Cloning. These criticisms were followed a few months later by the setting up of the Donaldson Committee.
On 16 August 2000 the Donaldson Report was finally published. See our Press Release and Background Information.
On February 2000, Dr Bruce was invited to the House of Commons to address MP's by the Bio-Industry Association and in December 200 by the Human Genetics Forum (both sides of the debate!). His paper is given in Address to MPs on ethical aspects of therapeutic uses of cloning. In December 2000 and January 2001, the UK Parliament debated the report ande voted to allow the cloning of embryos to produce human stem cells for research, and to allow embryo cloning. Was this right or have we opened the door too far? SRT assessed the outcome of the vote in a paper Are Embryonic Stem Cells a Step too Far?.
On 20 November 2001, Dr Bruce took part in a Round Table on the patenting of human stem cells organised by the European Commission ethical advisory group on science and technology. This is a Discussion Paper on Stem Cell Patenting prepared on behalf of the Conference of European Churches working group on bioethics.
We haven't surveyed the field properly to give an exhaustive list, but here are a few links to sites worth visiting on cloning issues :
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This page has been produced by the Society Religion and Technology Project of the Church of Scotland. For more about our work on other issues, see our Other SRT Project pages, our SRT Publications List, or our On-line SRT Newsletter.
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This SRT cloning and stem cells home page was last revised on 11 January 2007. It originally began in May 1996, nine months before the announcement of the cloning of Dolly, and has been expanding ever since.
