Sheep Cloner Gets Human License
The British government on Tuesday gave the creator of Dolly the Sheep a human cloning license for medical research.
It is the second such license approved since Britain became the first country to legalize research cloning in 2001.
The Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, which regulates such research, approved the license for Ian Wilmut, who led the team that created Dolly at Scotland's Roslin Institute in 1996.
He applied in September to Britain's fertility authority for a human cloning license to study how nerve cells go awry to cause motor neuron disease.
Wilmut's focus will be on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS or "Lou Gehrig's Disease," reports CBS News Correspondent Steve Holt.
"This will create totally new opportunities to begin to understand the disease, to begin to test new drugs, and to research the disease in totally new ways that can't be done in any other way," Wilmut told the BBC.
The first license was granted in August to a team at Newcastle University that hopes to use cloning to create insulin-producing cells that could be transplanted into diabetics.
Such work, called therapeutic cloning because it does not result in a baby, is opposed by abortion foes and other biological conservatives because researchers must destroy human embryos to harvest the cells. Such research is illegal in the U.S.
"These remarkable cells, which can make any cell type in the body, actually seem to prefer to make nerves," said Prof. Roger Peterson of Cambridge University.
Wilmut and motor neuron expert Christopher Shaw of the Institute of Psychiatry in London plan to clone cells from patients with the incurable muscle-wasting disease, derive blank-slate stem cells from the cloned embryo, make them develop into nerve cells and compare their development with nerve cells derived from healthy embryos.
"I think this is a very exciting development," said Peterson. "It will enable the disease to be studied throughout its development in the very earliest stages, when the cells are still normal, to when they become abnormal."
The mechanism behind motor neuron disease is poorly understood because the nerves are inaccessible in the brain and central nervous system and cannot be removed from patients.