Scientist Sees Rapid Cloning and Stem Cell Advance

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Tuesday December 4 4:55 PM ET
Scientist Sees Rapid Cloning and Stem Cell Advance

By Joanne Kenen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of the biotechnology firm that reported recent breakthroughs in human cloning said on Tuesday that his team was making swift progress toward achieving new human therapies within six months and urged Congress not to interfere.

Michael West, president of the Massachusetts company Advanced Cell Technologies, which said last month that it had cloned a human embryo, told a Senate panel he would be disappointed if his team could not make major scientific advances within six months -- creating longer-lived embryos and extracting stem cells and turning them into human tissue such as heart muscle or neurons.

West, who is also a scientist and member of the company's cloning research team, said that if Congress delayed or banned his research, it would be tantamount to depriving 3,000 people a day of potential treatments for degenerative disease.

ACT's earlier announcements about cloning have raised an ethical storm over the morality of the research and been criticized by many scientists, who say the achievements have been overstated because the embryos were only a few cells and lived only a few hours.

Even one of the scientists at West's own company, Tanja Dominko, told a scientific conference in Washington this week that it may turn out that it is not possible to clone a human.

``It might be that you just can't make humans this way,'' she said.

ACT has stressed that its goal is not to clone a human baby but to develop these embryos long enough to extract stem cells. These master cells have the potential to turn into any human cells and hold immense, though still unproven, promise for treating many diseases, including Parkinson's, diabetes and heart disease.

West told the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on health that although ``science moves at an unpredictable rate,'' he would be disappointed if within six months he had not achieved cell line differentiation -- getting the stem cells and turning them into specific kinds of cells.

``You heard it absolutely correctly,'' he told lawmakers who seemed startled by his bold timetable.

Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, said that instead of seeking to slow down research that he called ``exhilarating,'' the Senate should ``promote and support it as much as we can.''

Harkin, the subcommittee chairman, said he plans to introduce legislation that will make human reproductive cloning -- creating a cloned baby -- a crime. But it would allow potentially lifesaving cellular research like that described by West.

Led by Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, lawmakers opposed to all cloning have been pushing for at least a six-month moratorium on the research while Congress considers a permanent ban. Many of Brownback's opponents had said such a pause was unnecessary because breakthroughs were not imminent.

Backed by President Bush (news - web sites), the House voted in August to ban all human cloning. But the Senate has put off action because it is divided between those who want to stop all forms of cloning and those who want to prevent the cloning of a human baby but to permit so-called therapeutic cloning to further stem cell research.

Other scientists and ethicists testifying before the Senate panel tried to distinguish between a natural human embryo and a version cloned through ACT's nuclear transfer technique, which involves removing the nucleus of an egg and replacing it with that of another cell.

The natural embryo is formed by fertilization and contains genetic material of a father and mother. The cloned one is formed by nuclear transfer and contains genetic material of only one person.

``They represent an entirely new kind of biological organism never seen before in nature,'' said Ronald Green, a professor of religion and ethics at Dartmouth College who serves on ACT's independent ethics review board.

``It is essential to distinguish a human being from human cells. They are very different beasts,'' said Bert Vogelstein, a cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University and the chairman of a major ethical review of stem cell research.

Brownback and his allies have made several attempts over the past week to get a ban or moratorium through the Senate, but Senate leaders say they do not plan to take up the issue until February or March.