12 April 2012

A House of Lords Select Committee has approved the creation of human embryos for the purposes of researching and treating disease. This is not a new departure. It is already legal to create embryos for medical experimentation, chiefly to improve the effectiveness of fertility treatments, following the recommendations of the Warnock report.

But the new development - which was initially approved by parliament last summer and subsequently challenged - greatly expands the number of purposes for which embryos can be produced. Some of them will be produced by therapeutic cloning - using similar technology to that which produced Dolly the sheep - and proponents of the scheme are anxious to emphasise that this is a very different matter from reproductive cloning. The point of creating human embryos is in order to harvest them for stem cells, early cells which have the potential to turn into tissue of almost any kind.

If scientists can find a way to direct the development of these cells it could, potentially, open the way for the treatment of distressing afflictions such as leukaemia. Of course, this is a wholly admirable objective. But achieving it by means of the therapeutic cloning of human embryos raises grave moral issues. There is an alternative. Adult stem cells are an unproblematic source of research material and newborn babies' umbilical fluid can be used for some therapeutic procedures.

Exploiting these would allow scientists to produce a bank of stem cells without any moral difficulties. However, this is a particularly inexact area of science; it is exceptionally difficult to persuade stem cells to specialise in one direction rather than another and some of the results so far, particularly in treating Parkinson's Disease, have been spectacularly unsuccessful. Other European countries and the US have voiced grave doubts about the morality of therapeutic cloning. It would have been wise if Britain had explored all the alternatives before proceeding with this emotive ethical precedent.

Careless talk

Nine out of 10 motorists want to ban mobile phone use at the wheel, according to a survey. Surveys, however, prompt the answers people believe the questioner wants. Of course, most rational people would like to make the roads safer by stopping motorists from talking and attempting to drive at the same time. The trouble is, they never want to stop doing it themselves. Smarter market researchers would have phoned 1,000 drivers at the wheel to see how many - or how few - could restrain themselves from taking the call.

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