An Israeli committee of leading experts in science, medicine, civil and Jewish law, philosophy, and ethics has agreed guidelines approving the therapeutic use of human embryonic stem cells.
The bioethics advisory committee of the Israel Academy of Sciences and the Arts has endorsed both the use by researchers of embryonic cells from embryos left over from in vitro fertilisation and the possibility of therapeutic cloning of new embryos, although not for reproductive purposes.
A 1999 law already prohibits the use of embryonic stem cells to produce genetic copies of parents. But the committee noted that although using embryo cloning to create a “complete human being” must be prohibited, this did not rule out cloning embryos and using stem cells removed within their first two weeks of development for therapeutic purposes.