LONDON, Nov. 26 (UPI) -- Parliament on Monday debated emergency legislation to ban human reproductive cloning in Britain after U.S. scientists announced they had achieved a breakthrough in cloning human embryos.
The new laws, drafted last week, close a legal loophole in the United Kingdom created when the nation's high court ruled that, under current law, human cloning was still legal.
Under the new legislation, scientists would be banned from implanting cloned embryos into human wombs. The proposed law would not bar so-called "therapeutic cloning" using cell nuclear replacement for research -- the technique used to produce Dolly the cloned sheep.
Human embryos have become what some experts refer to as a "holy grail" because they contain stem cells which can be used to create virtually any human tissue and which show promise in the treatment of cancer, AIDS, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's.
Parliament already had set the groundwork for the debate before the Advanced Cell Technology Inc. in the United States announced its breakthrough. The House of Lords tackled the bill on Monday. It was expected to clear the lower chamber, the House of Commons, on Thursday.
The legislation specifically makes it a criminal offense "to place in the womb of a woman a human embryo that has been created other than by fertilization."
The U.K. government already had passed a law aimed at banning the cloning of a human baby, but the High Court ruled 10 days ago that the legislation was flawed and could not stand.
According to one expert, the flaw centered on the legal definition of an embryo -- the union of an egg and a sperm. The High Court ruled that because a clone is produced in a different way, the law as it stood did not embrace the new technology.
Government officials feared this constituted a legal loophole that could allow scientists to conduct experiments in cloning without official permission of Britain's Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, which is supposed to oversee this field of research.
Some scientists, including Italian fertility doctor Severino Antinori, have said the U.K. High Court's ruling opened the way to creating cloned embryos and implanting them.
But both the old law and the new legislation were written to allow therapeutic cloning to develop replacement cells for the treatment of degenerative diseases.
John Smeaton, national director of the Society for the Protection of unborn children, said "this underlines the need for the government's bill to be fundamentally changed so that all forms of human cloning, both experimental cloning and cloning for childbirth, are completely banned."
