Old World News: Two of a Kind: Or None?

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When it was reported that Dolly, the sheep cloned in Edinburgh, was named after Dolly Parton, I fell to wondering whether technology's memorial to her would survive as long in the public imagination as Mae West's. In the end I concluded that cloned sheep are never likely to have the ubiquity of inflatable life-jackets. For one thing the science is still uncertain: it required the transfer of 277 adult mammary cell nuclei into sheep ova to produce one Dolly. For another, it is unlikely that there will be a favorable legislative climate in most countries. The Scottish experiment was done under a license granted by the U.K. Home Office, which administers the law on animal experiments. Reading between the lines of its report,[1] the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee was unhappy that the Home Office had not appreciated the wider ethical implications of the work being licensed. It has recommended much greater collaboration among governmental committees when considering work with implications--especially ethical--for human genetics. The controls on cloning of animals and humans are probably as tight in the U.K. as anywhere in Europe. In addition to the 1986 law on animal experiments, the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act was designed specifically to ban cloning, by prohibiting "replacing a nucleus of an embryo with a nucleus taken from a cell of any person, embryo or subsequent development of an embryo." Since Dolly was created by the transfer of a cell nucleus to an ovum, that technique, when used in humans, may not be prohibited by the act. It would certainly require a license from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which would not be granted at present. Even so, the House of Commons committee concluded that the law should be tightened further to make certain that human cloning does not occur in the U.K. Elsewhere in Europe the picture is mostly one of no existing specific laws, but of preparation for specific legislative bans on the cloning of humans, and in some countries higher mammals. In Italy, for instance, the announcement of Dolly's creation was greeted by the Minister of Health issuing a decree forbidding any human cloning for one year while legislation is drawn up and presented to Parliament early next year. In Norway, where bees have been cloned, the Storting (parliament) has already voted 153 to 2 on a motion to ban cloning. So a law is being drafted to outlaw cloning of humans and of higher mammals, except where such work might be of significant medical value. The position on cloning in Germany lies between those of the U.K. and Norway. The Embryonenschutzgesetz[2] was intended to make cloning of humans impossible, but, like the U.K. law, it was drawn up at a time when the Scottish technique was not envisaged. It includes an absolute ban on surrogate motherhood, the final stage of the Scottish technique, but some experts think that it may need tightening up. …