Scientists and bioethicists have expressed serious concerns about the ethical implications of a new technique 
that uses and destroys cloned embryos to harvest stem cells for experimentation.
Professor Martin Clynes, director of the National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology at Dublin City University, said that the new technique, which involves the transfer of a donor cell to an egg cell whose nucleus has been removed, creating a human embryo, has“probably” not gotten over the ethical issues involved with so-called therapeutic cloning, the Irish Times reports.
Ethicists have objected to therapeutic cloning because it involves the creation and subsequent destruction of human embryos for medical research purposes.
Developmental and stem cell biologist Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his team transferred nuclei from human skin cells into the cytoplasm of human egg cells, generating blastocysts that gave rise to human embyonic stem cell (hESC) colonies.
Blastocysts are human embryos at an early stage of development.
“The resulting hESCs resembled those derived from fertilised embryos, had no chromosomal abnormalities, showed normal gene activity, and were capable of turning into more specialized cell types that could be used for replacing damaged tissues,” a press release accompanying the new discovery said.
However, leading bioethicist Professor William Hurlbut has also expressed concern at the new technique.
Professor Hurlbut told Christianity Today that the new discovery could “mark the beginning of a whole new chapter of moral scientific controversy”.
He said: “Any reasonable person would have serious concerns about where this approach will lead us. We need to find morally acceptable ways forward that do not involve the direct creation and destruction of human embryos
“I believe we need to have both a theoretical basis and empirical evidence that what we are doing does not create an embryo, not just evidence that it can’t implant and keep growing.
“I think it’s extremely important that we proceed with moral consensus and social solidarity in our federal funding of biomedical research.
“From fertilisation onwards, regardless of how you’re getting the embryo, we should regard all stages of human development as being those of a living human organism and therefore morally inviolable being.”
Irish-based scientists said the Government must act to introduce legislation that would regulate, but permit embryonic research activity.
“There is currently no legislation in the area of stem cell research in Ireland,” the Irish Medicines Board said yesterday. It understood however that the Department of Health was currently drafting a Human Tissues Act “and the intent is that this will include regulation of research use of tissues and cells”, it said .
The board does enforce controls on the use of tissues and cells under the European Communities Quality and Safety of Human Tissues and Cells Regulations 2006. But these relate to the clinical use of these as treatments for patients, it pointed out. “The scope of this legislation does not include tissues and cells used for research purposes,” it said.
The only other controls are imposed by the Medical Council, which forbids registered doctors from conducting research on embryos, and each university has its own ethics committee, set up to regulate the conduct of research.
These committees can block funding to prevent unacceptable experimentation.
However the University College Cork governing body voted in 2008 to allow embryonic research by a narrow margin.