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Chinese connection beats the ban on cloning technique

An experimental fertility technique, tested on five women in China because it would be banned in the US and Britain, has been condemned as perilously close to procedures used in cloning and in any case unethical.

One woman became pregnant with triplet embryos, one of which survived 29 weeks -- the first human pregnancy using a cell nuclear transfer of the sort that produced the cloned sheep Dolly.

Technically it was not cloning because the embryo contained DNA from the mother and father (and a tiny amount from the egg donor) but it used techniques outlawed in the UK due to their potential for use in cloning.

The pregnancy was a collaboration between physicians at Sun Yat-sen medical university in China and an American professor warned by US regulators not to attempt such experiments at home.

At the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas, yesterday, the team published their work but would not discuss its ethics.

They took eggs from five women and fertilized them in a test tube. They also fertilized eggs from anonymous donors. The nuclei of the donated eggs was removed, and replaced with the DNA-containing nuclei of eggs from the five women. These eggs were then put back in their wombs.

One woman became pregnant with triplets. An operation was done to "reduce" the embryos to two in the interests of maintaining the pregnancy, but the remaining two also died, the final one at 29 weeks.

"It is not legal in this country because it uses precisely the same techniques as cloning. It is transferring genetic material from one person's embryo to another person's egg," said Richard Kennedy, secretary of the British Fertility Society.

James Grifo, director of reproductive endocrinology at New York university, was the senior on the team. According to the Wall Street Journal, he has twice been warned by the Food and Drug Administration in the US not to continue research into nuclear transfer.

The Chinese experiment was not approved by his university.

Last week, China banned human cloning, trading in eggs for profit, and controls on experiments on eggs and sperm in the name of fertility.
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