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Society, Religion and Technology Project Church of Scotland Looking at the ethics of technology for a New Millennium

In a forthcoming book Professor Ian Wilmut has reopened an ethical controversy by adocating the future use of cloning and genetic modification of humans to address serious inherited diseases. Professor Wilmut led the team which cloned Dolly the sheep at the Roslin Institute. It was immediately recognised that nuclear transfer cloning could also provide a way to seek to correct genetic 'defects' which cause diseases such as Huntington's disease and cystic fibrosis, within the human embryo. Germline gene therapy, as this is called, means that the change happens not only in that individual but in all their subsequent offspring. From an embryo known to be affected by a hereditary disease, the stem cells would be removed and modified to correct the genetic fault. Nuclear transfer cloning would insert these corrected cells into a enucleated human egg, to create an embryo that was a clone of the original embryo (which would be destroyed), but without the defect. This embryo would then be implanted in the womb and allowed to develop into a baby.

A year after Dolly, Roslin and PPL Therapeutics produced the sheep Polly, the first animal to be both cloned and also genetically modified. This and has been repeated in mice and some other farm animals, but this has never been done in humans. It raises serious ethical problems, and indeed would be illegal in the UK and many other countries. Indeed when Professor Wilmut first made this suggestion in 2004, it met with considerable criticism.

To advocate both human reproductive cloning and altering the human genetic inheritance raises two of the most ethical serious issues in human reproductive science. While the Church of Scotland accepted the cloning of the sheep to assist the genetic modification to make therapeutic proteins in sheep's milk, cloning and modifying humans permanently is not the same. There are basic ethical distinctions between animals and humans which lead to major objections. There fundamental objections to human reproductive cloning, quite apart from the risks. Germline modification would mean running inevitably risky experiments on human beings, who are not laboratory animals. To change genetic inheritance irrevocably would override the consent of unborn generations.

Professor Wilmut's suggestion meant creating an embryo and destroying it, in order to create another a cloned embryo free of the defect. This presents a serious ethical objection of unacceptable instrumentality towards the first embryo. People in the church and outside differ on whether we should give an early embryo the same moral status as a baby, but few would consider that a 200 cell embryo possesses no moral status at all. Many might think - as a 1995 report of the Church of Scotland on human genetics suggested - that it was far better simply to select embryos in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and selection, or elso to seek through gene therapy to correct a genetic 'defect' in an adult.

It is too simple ethically to argue that to prevent a child being born with a heritary disease overrides all these other serious considerations. Medicine has always had moral limits in what may and may not be done in the name of saving life and treating suffering. Not all means justify those ends. We also disagree with the Daily Telegraph's editorial that this is just a matter for individual choice. When we are talking about permanent genetic change to all future offspring from this embryo, we are no longer only dealing with the deep dilemma and heartache of an individual family decision. We are also dealing with questions of rights and unknown risks of people far into the future. It is proper for those matters to be part of a societal decision, through Parliament.