A license to clone for British scientist

LONDON — The British government Tuesday gave the creator of Dolly the sheep a license to clone human embryos for medical research into the cause of motor neuron disease.

Ian Wilmut, who led the team that created Dolly at Scotland's Roslin Institute in 1996, and motor neuron expert Christopher Shaw of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, plan to clone embryos to study how nerve cells go awry to cause the disease. The experiments do not involve creating cloned babies.

It is the second such license approved since Britain became the first country to legalize research cloning in 2001. The first was granted in August to a team that hopes to use cloning to create insulin-producing cells that could be transplanted into diabetics.

Dr. Brian Dickie, director of research at the London-based Motor Neuron Disease Association, said the latest decision by the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority means "we are a step closer to medical research that has the potential to revolutionize the future treatment of neuron disease," an incurable muscle-wasting condition that afflicts about 350,000 people and kills some 100,000 each year.

The study of the stem cells is expected to help in developing future treatments. The cells would not be used to correct the disease.

While the latest project would not use the stem cells to correct the disease, the study of the cells is expected to help scientists develop future treatments, according to the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, which regulates such research and approved the license.

Stem cells are the master cells of the body. They appear when embryos are just a few days old and go on to develop into every type of cell and tissue in the body. Scientists hope to be able to extract the stem cells from embryos when they are in their blank state and direct them to form any desired cell type to treat a variety of diseases, ranging from Parkinson's to diabetes.

Getting the cells from an embryo that is cloned from a sick patient could allow scientists to track how diseases develop and provide genetically matched cell transplants that do not cause the immune systems to reject the transplant.

Such work, called therapeutic cloning because it does not result in a baby, is opposed by abortion foes and other biological conservatives because researchers must destroy human embryos to harvest the cells.

Wilmut has repeatedly condemned the idea of human cloning to create babies, but not so-called therapeutic cloning.