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Vatican condemns license for cloning human embryos

By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The Vatican condemned the British government's permission to a group of researchers to clone human embryos for therapeutic aims.

Calling the new move "morally unacceptable," the Vatican's spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, reiterated the church's position on artificially creating human embryos.

Pope "John Paul II firmly condemns any type of human cloning," he told reporters Aug. 11, the same day British regulators gave a group of scientists permission to clone human embryos to produce stem cells to treat disease.

It marked the first time the British government, through its watchdog agency, the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, granted researchers a license for the procedure since the government legalized cloning for therapeutic reasons in 2001. Cloning human embryos for reproductive purposes is still illegal in the United Kingdom.

Scientists differentiate therapeutic from reproductive cloning; though the techniques to artificially create a human embryo are the same, the purposes are different.

Therapeutic cloning is undertaken not to create a human being, but to produce stem cells that can be used to grow replacement tissue in treating such conditions as diabetes and Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. But the church opposes both processes because they seek to create a human embryo by substituting or excluding the conjugal act between a man and a woman.

Therapeutic cloning also involves the destruction of the human embryo after its stem cells have been harvested.

The World Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, whose headquarters are based in Vatican City, condemned Britain's release of its first cloning license.

The moral justifications used to support therapeutic cloning – such as to cure degenerative diseases – are "fictitious," it said in a press release Aug. 12.

"The humanitarian aims are ... used to manipulate public opinion in order to cover up the enormous industrial and financial interests that lie behind (research in cloned) stem cells," it said.

The head of the Bioethics Institute at Rome's Sacred Heart University, Msgr. Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, said the group in Britain receiving the new license "seriously lacked transparency in the reasons for its research and how it will be carried out."

"Their primary motive, it seems to me, is they really want to improve the process and outcome of (artificial) fertilization," he told Catholic News Service Aug. 12.

Cloning human embryos to harvest stem cells for therapeutic reasons "will take years," he said.

"It also doesn't make sense either ethically or scientifically, since these cells have serious problems" such as developing malformations or becoming cancerous, he added.

The church supports stem-cell research for therapeutic reasons when the stem cells come from adults or umbilical cords – procedures that do not entail the destruction or artificial creation of human life.

Msgr. Carrasco, who is also a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said scientists are closer to finding cures using adult or umbilical stem cells than through cloning.

"Adult stem cells have already been used to repair damage after a heart attack, and they have been used to reproduce a liver in a mouse. Most research is done with adult stem cells anyway, and no one has a problem working with them," he said.

The British-based research team receiving the license is made up of experts from the Institute of Human Genetics at Newcastle, England, and the Newcastle Fertility Centre.

British pro-lifers have condemned the granting of permission to scientists to perform therapeutic cloning using human embryos.

The British pro-life group Life said Aug. 11 in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. that the announcement was a "'deplorable step."

Life National Chairman Jack Scarisbrick said therapeutic cloning supposedly will open the way to curing diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, but he said "the end does not justify the means. This is a fundamental principle."

"The real reason for seeking this permission is probably as much about power, forbidden fruit and breaching taboos as curing diseases. It's runaway science," he said.

Alison Murdoch of the Newcastle Fertility Centre, who is leading the research, told the BBC Aug. 11 that the potential for the research was "immensely exciting."

She said that realistically it would take at least five years of laboratory-based work before moving to clinical trials.

Suzi Leather, chair of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, told the BBC that an initial one-year research license had been granted after "careful consideration of all the scientific, ethical, legal and medical aspects of the project."

Msgr. Carrasco told CNS, "For them 'ethical' means 'useful.' They don't consider that there are other values out there like the value of human life."

Contributing to this story was Paulinus Barnes in Manchester, England.