Dr
Robin Lovell-Badge is Head of Research
into Developmental Genetics at the National Institute
of Medical Research. He is interested in how cells
choose their fate and is familiar with the techniques
used in cloning, having worked with embryonic stem
cells from the mouse for about 25 years. He feels
that research into cloning technology and maybe
its application will be very useful in curing people
with a wide range of diseases.
On
cloning human beings:
"The
issues that we are all concerned with are how to
cure people of diseases, not make copies of people
and I think that the technology is certainly not
there, and there is no evidence that it's going
to get thereto be sufficiently successful to do
reproductive cloning."
On
the need to use an embryo on the way to creating
new tissues from adult cells:
"I agree that using adult stem cells has potential,
but we also don't know the limitations, so we mustn't
get too excited yet about adult stem cells, because
there are many potential problems.
There
is a lot of evidence to suggest that cells actually
know where they've come from, they have a memory
where they are. So you're asking them not only to
change their cell type, but to change where they
come from. So we should do research on adult stem
cells and embryonic stem cells.
I
think that at the moment the practical barriers
to reproductive cloning are so great; even though
there are all these successes with animals, that
the vast majority of attempts at reproductive cloning,
fail somewhere in embryonic development. You could
not possibly ask someone to accept the risk associated
with failure of an embryo in the order of something
like 90% or more. That's just too high.
I
think the sorts of abnormalities that you get from
cloning and In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) are very
species specific. In mice we can do IVF very successfully
and never see any problems, but cloning is much
more difficult, a lot of the embryos fail, and of
those that are born, depending on which cell type
you use as a donor, you can see a range of different
problems in the cloned animals. So it's an unsafe
technology, which certainly at the moment in my
view shouldn't even be tried on humans, because
you can't try it without risking it."
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On
whether problems that develop when cloning whole
animals, will develop in cloned embryonic stem cells
that scientists want to use to treat disease:
"It is certainly an issue we have to worry about,
whether any embryonic stem cell line coming from
a cloning attempt is normal, but you have to also
look at the other side. Someone suffering from Parkinson’s
disease might not mind that there's something not
quite perfect about the cells you are putting back
in there."
On
the 14 day research limit on experimental research
on human embryos:
"The 14 day limit is very sensible in many respects,
it is the point before when the primitive nervous
system begins to develop, and I think we're human
because of our wonderful nervous systems. And 14
days is enough, because what we what to do is research
in the dish, we don't want to research using surrogate
mothers."
On
the future:
"I think there will be a range of options available
for curing people of disease and trauma and they
will include therapies that have come from embryonic
stem cells, whether by therapeutic cloning or otherwise,
there will be use of adult stem cells, and there
will be ways of reprogramming in situ if you like,
making the stem cells that are present in the tissue
to regenerate themselves, in a more efficient way
than they normally do."
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