Although the US House of Representatives voted last week to ban human cloning, the issue has not been resolved.
The bill will not become law unless passed this autumn by the Senate. The bill prohibits the cloning of human beings for producing babies and for medical research, making it a criminal offence punishable by up to 10 years in prison and fines of at least $1m (£0.7m), and prohibits importation of treatments derived from cloned embryos.
The House of Representatives rejected a bill allowing “therapeutic cloning.” This technique, also called “somatic cell nuclear transfer,” would produce a blastocyst (a term preferred to “embryo” by the technique's proponents) derived from the patient's own cells and could be used to create individually tailored treatments.
The cloning debate is entangled with debates on abortion and stem cell research that uses embryos discarded by fertility clinics. Stem cells can grow into any human tissue and could be used in regenerative treatments. However, the cells would not be compatible with a patient's immune system, and lifelong immunosuppressive treatment would be needed. “Therapeutic cloning” would avoid this problem by creating a blastocyst derived from the patient's own cells.
The American Medical Association earlier opposed “human cloning” to produce a baby but took no position on somatic cell nuclear transfer.
Jeff Trewhitt, spokesman for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said that his organisation supported the cloning of individual cells, genes, and tissues to make new medicines.
“It's not the same as cloning human embryos,” he said. Genetic engineering has led to 78 new drugs that are now on the market, and a third of drugs in ongoing clinical trials were developed through genetic engineering.