Cloning is the future of medical research

Says Dr Bill Ritchie, embryologist and part of the team behind Dolly the

What’s really important is we’re pushing the frontiers of science to benefit humans

Whenever a new species is cloned people want to know if it is a step towards cloning humans. It was the first thing we were asked when we cloned Dolly the Sheep.

You cannot say it will never happen – before we cloned Dolly we were told that was impossible.

But I don’t think cloning these monkeys is a step to cloning humans and I don’t see any reason for cloning humans.

It has proved very difficult to clone primates, just as it has been difficult to clone other species. The number of eggs they used to get these animals was substantial and the only animals to survive came from cells from a foetus, not from an adult.

What is the incentive to clone a human foetus before you know its characteristics? The further you go in an animal’s development, the more difficult it becomes.

The suffering involved in trying to clone adult cells, the number of miscarriages, is something no-one in their right mind would want to experiment with.

Also, when you look at similar experiments, many of the animals didn’t live very long. Dolly died from lung disease when she was seven. A gaur, a type of wild cattle, cloned in 2001 died within 48 hours. These were early experiments, but it is going to be much more difficult to try to clone a human. And why want you want to? We are all a result of our development, moulded by things we have done and people we have been involved with.

So even if it was possible to clone an adult male, the result would be far less similar to the original than, say, identical twins who had very similar upbringing and experiences.

Cloning monkeys is a more significant step in terms of medical tests because it gives you the possibility of comparing treatments in identical animals.

These monkeys are genetically much closer to humans than any other animals, so are more useful in studying some human diseases.

What is really important is that we are pushing the frontiers of science to benefit humans.

Dolly got people thinking about what we can do with cells. I think the stem cell revolution came partly out of cloning her, that’s Dolly’s legacy. And it’s possible these monkeys will inspire other scientists to make similar strides.