BBC The Next Big Thing

Dr Michael West is President and Chief Executive Officer of Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. (ACT), a biotechnology company based in the USA. ACT is a company engaged in the research and development of technologies enabling the genetic manipulation of cells to produce transgenic animals for pharmaceutical protein production. The company is also developing transgenic cloned cells and tissues for applications in cell and organ transplant therapy. Dr Michael West's research interests include age-related degenerative diseases, for example, Parkinson’s disease and arthritis.

On cloning human beings:
"What scientists were excited about when Dolly was cloned, what cloning means, is that you can take a skin cell back to an embryonic state and of course make a whole copy of you, and in that copy of you is liver, kidney and brain cells, all the cells of the human body, which means that we've found a way to take a skin cell and turn it into any other cell in the body. If we can do that with cells, not cloning people, but cells, it would be a revolution in medicine."

On the need to use an embryo on the way to creating new tissues from adult cells:
"We know that the embryonic stem cell can form every cell and tissue in the human body, but I would argue that we don't know that an adult stem cell can make every cell and tissue."

On cloning human embryos:
"We have cloned human embryos, not people. We're interested in cloning cells, not people. But I must say, because there's been so many stories written about this whole area of cloning, it’s cluttered with myth. And one of the important areas of myth, that we need to de-mythologise in thinking about human cloning, is that cloned animals are all abnormal. This results from scientists that mean well, but potentially have misinformed the public in their enthusiasm to say that we shouldn't clone a human being, because we don't know that we are safe. We have told the public that cloned animals have this and that problem, but in reality, in most cases, like in cattle cloning, the problems that we are seeing, are not related to cloning. The abnormalities relate to the procedure of having an embryo growing in the laboratory, not cloning itself, but the In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) procedure.

As an example of cloned cattle, if you make an embryo of a cow in vitro, like we make IVF children, maybe 50% of those will successfully lead to a live birth. In the case of cloning, about 20% of mothers that have cloned embryos put in them will result in a healthy live birth in our hands. So the numbers aren't the same, but what I am saying is that the abnormalities you see are the same abnormalities as IVF. We have no reason to believe that cloning itself, at least in cattle, is introducing unique problems.

We don't know that a cloned human would be abnormal, but because we don't know that it wouldn't be, the scientific community is still saying we should not proceed with the cloning of a human being at this time.

In the case of the medical applications of cloning, we are talking about human lives at stake. We are talking about children with diabetes, people with Alzheimer’s disease and arthritis. In the case of reproductive cloning, maybe there's a childless couple, maybe the day would come when we as a society would allow reproductive cloning. So I would argue, lets agree that we don't do it now, but then lets put a timeframe on it, and say it wont happen for the next ten years, but we'll look at it again in ten years time."

On whether problems that develop when cloning whole animals, will develop in cloned embryonic stem cells that scientists want to use to treat disease:
"To the question, 'is it easier to clone cells than it would be to clone a person?', the answer I think I can comfortably say is: it's far easier. We have nearly 70% certainty that we'll get a cloned embryo and potentially we could get stem cells, in the case of human, whereas the actual cloned animal is far more difficult to get. So even though animal cloning isn't that efficient today, you would expect that the production of embryos from stem cells would be far easier to do."

On whether there is a need to use embryonic stem cells:
"As scientists we are enthusiastic about our own research, that's what makes science work, but we have to think about the patients first, and I think we should ratchet back a step on our enthusiasm and say 'we should do all of these things'.

We don't know which is going to be best for specific diseases or particular individuals. We just don't know. We can't predict. There's no point in stopping research in one area to concentrate on another. It is ethically unacceptable not to do the research.

A well known ethicist say 'what's the rush' because of these ethical discussions, lets just wait a few years and see how these adult stem cells do. My point is, some people don't have a 10 years. For some people, that's a lifetime and I think that it's immoral and insensitive, not to allow all researchers to work as quickly as they can, to cure these life-threatening diseases."

On the 14 day research limit on experimental research on human embryos:
"I believe that 14 day limit is an important one, because what we are saying is, we're proposing making primitive cells, not a pregnancy. If you allow these cells, these embryonic cells and these pre-implantation embryos, past 14 days, something changes. It's called individualisation, you'd cross a line in development when those primitive cells, where there is no body cells of any kind, start to form a human being. And to say that we would create a human being, even in its earliest stages of development, and then harvest tissues from them, is a completely different argument and I, for one, am not comfortable with that."

On the future:
"I think that in the future there will never need to be the day when a patient with an incurable degenerative disease; where some cells and tissues are sick and need to be replaced, that the patients will need to die. I think that we'll have what we call regenerative medicine - the ability of making new young cells and tissues to replace diseased ones."

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