Part 5 – Cloning

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BBC Learning English
Talk about English
Insight Plus
Part 5 – Cloning


Jackie: Welcome to BBC Learning English dot com and Insight Plus - a series first
broadcast in 2001 that looks at the language of issues you hear about in the news.
How far should science go to help the sick and the suffering? Today on Insight
Plus, Lyse Doucet looks into the cloning debate.

Lyse: Cloning is copying, it can be applied to many things but here we are talking about
copy of a living organism. We are all made from billions of cells, and at the centre
of each one are the instructions - the blueprint - for building our bodies which is
stored in the form of a chemical called DNA. There are two types of cloning,
reproductive cloning where a new baby would be created or therapeutic cloning,
that’s about copying just some of the cells. Therapeutic cloning concentrates on
some special cells called stem cells - they’re the powerfully adaptable 'master cells'.
Opinion is deeply divided about whether or not we should develop this technology.
The BBC World Service has been reporting the developments made in this most
sensitive of issues, we hear first from Dr Robin Lovell-Badge of Britain's Medical
Research Council.

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These cells exist naturally in the body and they are there to replace cells that are lost through
natural processes, so you lose skin cells all the time, you lose cells from your intestines - your
guts - and there are stem cells in the brain to replace a few cells which are lost. And normally


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the stem cells divide just the right amount to maintain the organ in a good state. But in the
cases where there's accidental damage or a disease which affects a tissue or an organ, then
quite frequently the stem cells aren't able to divide fast enough to replace the damaged tissue.
So it's hoped that by growing them in a test tube, if you like, that they can be now used to
replace lost cells in a person

Lyse: As Dr Robin Lovell-Badge explained, stem cells regenerate tissue. They repair and
maintain our kidneys, liver and other organs. By introducing new stem cells into
the body, scientists hope to renew damaged tissue and even fight illnesses such as
heart disease and Parkinson's - a disease of the brain.

In 1998, American scientists succeeded in isolating and culturing – growing - stem
cells. They unlocked their potential for medical research and treatment. In future
stem cells could be a vital tool in the war to keep everyone well and healthy.

Doctors know that adult stem cells can develop into different cell types. In
Sweden, for example, the neural cells - cells taken from the brain of adult mice -
have been used to generate kidney, heart and liver cells. But researchers aren’t sure
whether adult stem cells are as perfectly adaptable as those found in embryos -
newly created lives. When an egg is fertilised by a sperm, it forms a ball of cells,
any of them can develop into almost any cell in the body. These 'master' cells -
embryonic stem cells - are at the centre of much of the current research.

Why is the procedure is causing so much anxiety? Well, one way of harvesting -
collecting - stem cells is to actually create embryosm, through a process known as
therapeutic cloning. It’s based on a technique pioneered at the Roslin Institute in
Edinburgh, in 1996, Dolly the sheep was born. Dolly was the first mammal cloned
from an adult cell - a nucleus taken from an adult sheep cell and inserted into an
empty egg. The egg's development into an embryo was triggered by a


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revolutionary new technique which makes it possible to clone existing animals -
and it could be used to produce human clones.

Once we have perfect copies of ourselves we’ll be able to repair and renew faulty
parts of our body. The transplant techniques we have now sometimes fail - in the
US, for example, twelve percent of patients receiving organs from dead donors die
within a year of the operation. That’s partly because our bodies work hard to reject
anything alien that is grafted onto it – anything that is imported into the body, even
if it’s a new lung, a liver or a new heart. Chronic rejection, which usually occurs
three or four years after the operation, causes even more deaths. In Britain, heart
transplant survival rates fall from 81% in the first year to 65% of patients surviving
five years after the operation. Professor Richard Gardner believes therapeutic
cloning could solve this problem.

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As with all organ transplants, just using the stem cells that were available you would not
always have a perfect match and you'd have to treat patients with drugs to stop the graft being
rejected. And that is why people are talking about going beyond this. And that would be taking
a human egg, putting the nucleus from the patient into that egg and instead of fertilising it,
activating it to grow just to the stage where you can derive embryonic stem cells, because they
would be genetically identical with the patient and you wouldn't have the problem of graft
rejection.

Lyse: That was Professor Richard Gardner, chairman of Britain’s Royal Society Working
Group on Therapeutic Cloning. He has great hopes for medical research in this
field. Let’s take for example the case of a male patient who needs a heart
transplant. Professor Gardner believes that one day it may be possible to extract
the nucleus of a cell from the patient to briefly clone an embryo of him and them to
use the embryo's stem cells to treat him. So the patient’s body would then accept


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stem cells which perfectly matched his genetic makeup instead of rejecting a
transplanted donor organ or a tissue graft. In future cell nuclear transfer could even
be used to create a personalised bank of stem cells, they could be stored and used
as and when the patient needs them.

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What we're looking for in the future is to get away from the situation where virtually all those
requiring a graft have to wait until someone else dies to provide a healthy organ or tissue for
them. The stem cells offer the prospect of building up banks of cells that you can then grow
them and make them become whatever cell type the patient requires.

Lyse: But treatments like these remain a distant prospect. When scientists understand and
can control the development of stem cells, activating their growth into nerve cells,
heart cells or blood cells, will they be able to use them in the treatment of disease.

Stem cell research is the subject of today’s Insight Plus from the BBC World
Service – it’s your guide to the language and background to the stories that stay in
the news. Some of the greatest medical advances of the 21st century may result
from stem cell research. The development and ethics of therapeutic cloning will
attract the attention of the world’s media for some time to come.

And governments around the world also face the ethical dilemmas provoked by this
field. Should scientists be allowed to harvest stem cells from embryos? Should the
cloning of human embryos be permitted, even if reproductive cloning, the creation
and birth of cloned human beings, is outlawed? Very young embryos are now
legally used in fertility research in many countries. The unwanted embryos used by
some of the American scientists who first cultured stem cells came from fertility
clinics. But in the United States public funds cannot be used for any research which
involves killing embryos.


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Britain is one of the first countries to consider legislation which would allow
therapeutic cloning and stem cell research on embryos up to 14 days old. A
committee headed by Professor Liam Donaldson, Britain’s Chief Medical Officer,
has spent a year preparing a report on stem cell research for the British
Government. It’s a debate that’s being heard around the world.

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The conclusions of the committee were that stem cells have an enormous potential to create
new forms of treatment for diseases which are currently incurable… major, major medical
potential. We need medical research to see if this potential can be realised. The potential
benefits in this balancing exercise outweigh some of the concerns and would be justified by the
potential benefits for future generations of patients - we are talking about here research at this
stage, not treatment.

Lyse: The committee say that the benefits outweigh the ethical concerns. They believe
research should continue, should go forward, but only if strict rules limit, or
regulate, the research. Professor Donaldson would like to see the law tightened to
ensure no-one is allowed to create a human being.

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Most important of all and without room for any ambiguity or doubt, that the creation of a
human being through cloning should not be permitted under any circumstances and is illegal at
the moment and should remain illegal, reinforced by even more legislation.

Lyse: Around the world, many who believe that an embryo, however young, is a human
life remain deeply concerned by the new research. Dr Sandy Thomas from Britain’s
ethics organisation, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, explains their concerns.


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People are concerned of course about how we should use embryos, if at all we should use
embryos for research. In some countries embryo research of any kind is prohibited. In others, a
very limited amount of embryo research is allowed. And the reason that there are ethical
concerns here is that obviously an embryo has the potential to become a human being and we
therefore should accord it some respect. The problem for many people is how much respect?
So much respect that we do no research at all on a one or two day old ball of cells, or for
example, respect at some perhaps slightly later line when we would not allow research, perhaps
fourteen days, as in the UK.

Lyse: Many who oppose embryo research believe scientists should only work with
adult stem cells. But scientists argue that even if therapeutic cloning was
banned, embryo research would still be needed to help them to understand how
stem cells function.

Today we've been discussing stem cell research and the ethics of therapeutic
cloning. One solution may lie in the pioneering technology used to create Dolly
the sheep. In this case, scientists reprogrammed the adult cell used to clone her.
The nucleus of the cell was taken to a near embryonic state before it was
inserted into an empty egg cell, it was then allowed to develop again as an
embryo. One day, scientists may be able to extract and 'reprogram' patient's cells
before they re-insert them into the body, there they would begin to regenerate
damaged tissue and organs. Such cells would never be implanted into an egg,
the creation and destruction of an embryo would be avoided.