Ethics conference hears of therapeutic cloning doubts

Stem cell researcher Prof Alan Trounson would support a moratorium on therapeutic cloning, but says that research into embryonic stem cells is still necessary.

Speaking at the University of Melbourne's annual ethics seminar on Friday, Trounson said that rapid advancements in alternative techniques for reprogramming cells made therapeutic cloning - creating a cloned embryo specifically for the treatment of the donor individual - an unsustainable practice.

"I'm not an advocate for therapeutic cloning, not because I have a moral problem with it, but because it doesn't sound sensible," Trounson said.

He said that the use of donor eggs to create clones was not sustainable given that it took 50-100 eggs to successfully make one embryonic stem cell line.

Another participant in the seminar, health ethics expert Dr Lynn Gillam, said that the issue of where the eggs would come from and the cost of the technology would be more important than the moral issue of whether to use embryonic stem cells.

But Trounson's arguments against therapeutic cloning did not rule out the use of embryonic stem cells in research. "It is important to address the realities of how fast this field is moving. It's way to early to decide that embryonic stem cells are not particularly useful," he said.

He cited recent techniques for reprogramming adult cells by fusion with embryonic stem cells as one very important development in the field. Another was the possibility of generating stem cell lines that were tolerated by patient's immune systems, and not rejected. Trounson, who is the CEO of the new Centre for Stem Cells and Tissue Repair, suggested that a number of "universal donor" cell lines could be created for therapeutic use.

Trounson's comments suggested that legislation to ban or limit stem cell research and therapeutic cloning might be rapidly outdated, given the pace of advances in the field.

This position was supported by Prof Loane Skene, professor of law at University of Melbourne and director of the Centre for Law and Genetics at the University of Tasmania/University of Melbourne, another participant in the seminar, who cautioned that legislation could impair the ability of scientists to do research, and would be very difficult to enforce.

"I think it is extremely difficult to phrase laws to ban particular types of conduct. We'd do better to use guidelines such as the NHMRC's," Skene said.

Skene explained that a new regulatory structure would be required to enforce a ban or moratorium, but using a guideline approach would be more flexible and easier to change, as well as easily accessible.