- © 2007 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors
Ten years ago this month, Ian Wilmut and colleagues from the Roslin Institute in Scotland published an article in Nature unceremoniously entitled: “Viable offspring derived from fetal and adult mammalian cells.” This was, of course, the publication that announced the birth of Dolly the cloned sheep.
The paper immediately made headlines around the world and stirred international debate. The scientific community hailed it as a major technical advance that could, among other things, facilitate the creation of animals for research, the production of pharmaceuticals and xenotransplantation. Science selected it as the scientific breakthrough of the year. And, with concomitant advances in embryonic stem cell research, speculation began about using somatic cell nuclear transfer, the technique that created Dolly, to engineer human tissue for the purposes of transplantation — a technique dubbed “therapeutic cloning.”
But it was the potential social issues that created the biggest stir. The creation of Dolly led to concerns about cloning a human being — a thought that reportedly horrified Wilmut. This concern spurred policy-makers everywhere to action. Indeed, the United Nations (UN) spent 3 years trying to negotiate an international ban on human cloning. Bogged down by differing views on the ethical acceptability of “therapeutic cloning,” in 2005 the UN General Assembly settled on an ambiguous non-binding Declaration that calls upon countries to prohibit all forms of human cloning that are “incompatible with human dignity.”
In Canada, the Assisted Human Reproduction Act bans all forms of human cloning.
Since 1997, there have been many other cloning controversies, including a 2002 human cloning hoax perpetrated by the Canadian cult, the Raelians, and, most recently, fraudulent somatic cell nuclear transfer research in Korea.
Where is cloning today? There is no evidence that anyone has successfully cloned a human, but the hoped for therapeutic breakthroughs have also been slow to emerge. And despite the hype and controversy, somatic cell nuclear transfer remains a relatively marginal research activity. Still, many researchers remain optimistic about the scientific potential of somatic cell nuclear transfer, including Wilmut. He recently switched his research focus to the cloning of human tissue for research purposes, an activity that remains illegal in Canada.
Footnotes
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Timothy Caulfield holds a Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy at the University of Alberta.