20000901-"Embryo cloning is therapeutic for one human being at the cost of the death of another".

"In therapeutic cloning, embryos will not give rise to new individuals. Not because they are not true embryos, but because they will be destroyed before they can develop. If these same embryos were implanted in a uterus, they would give rise to children. The ethical objections to human cloning 'for therapeutic purposes' are obvious: it is therapeutic for one human being, at the cost of the death of another". Dr. María Iraburu, professor of Biochemistry at the University of Navarra, explained the consequences of the initiative approved by the British government.

"Despite the fact that cloning was initially proposed as an alternative to human reproduction, the academic community has been mostly against this possibility, if only because of the high risk of miscarriage and the high consumption of eggs involved. However, the therapeutic applications that cloning opens up have awakened much more interest," the expert continued.

In the report graduate "research stem cells: medical progress with responsibility" the British Government has given the approval to human cloning for therapeutic purposes. "The most talked about application is in connection with another recent finding : the possibility of obtaining so-called 'stem cells' from embryos."

If an embryo of a few days old is taken," explained Dr. María Iraburu, "and its cells are disintegrated (thus destroying the embryo), it is possible to make them give rise to different types of cells and tissues. By combining the cloning technique with that of obtaining stem cells in humans, identical twins of adult persons could be artificially generated and used as a tissue bank in anticipation of future -or present- diseases".

Research to avoid destroying the embryo

Dr. Iraburu pointed out that "not all the applications of scientific discoveries are so destructive for mankind. Cloning is making it possible to generate copies of genetically modified animals so that their organs do not produce rejection when transplanted. Research is also being carried out to obtain "stem cells" by methods that do not involve generating and destroying an embryo".

In his opinion, "it is the responsibility of academic community and of governments to channel efforts towards these alternatives that are truly at the service of man - at any stage of his life development- and of his dignity" and he advocated "rejecting any therapy that manipulates and destroys man".

Likewise, the specialist from the University of Navarra explained the precedent set in 1997 by Doctors Wilnut and Campbell, from the Roslin Institute. "Since they published the cloning of Dolly in the journal Nature, advances in the cloning technique itself and, above all, in its possible therapeutic applications, have followed one after the other at a dizzying pace. The technique by which Dolly was generated makes it possible to obtain identical copies of an adult individual from the genetic material of non-reproductive cells, in Dolly's case mammary gland cells. By fusing the nucleus of one of these cells with a previously denucleated egg, an embryo is obtained that will have the same genetic characteristics as the starting organism".

The new organism generated would be, so to speak, an "artificial twin" of the original individual. "The cloning of Dolly," he continued, "was not merely a scientific whim, but was part of an ambitious program to generate and market identical genetically modified animals that could serve as biological factories for the production of certain substances."