U.K. ahead of the cloning race

LONDON - While American scientists pioneered the recent advances in the revolutionary field of stem cell research, Britain leapfrogged ahead to become the first nation to legalize human cloning for such experiments.

Bioethics experts say the reason is simple: Stem cell research, which involves destroying embryos, is too closely tied to the abortion issue for the U.S. Congress to fund research.

"It illustrates the dramatic distinction in the way we think about bioethics here and in Britain," said Glenn McGee, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania and editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Bioethics.

"The British are less worried about the fate of the embryo than about scientists abusing the technology. In Washington, it is the day of the fetus," said McGee, who has conducted comparative research on British and American approaches to genetic and stem cell research.

In the United States, "political fear of the religious right is what's holding it back and it will continue to hold it back," McGee said. "No congressman has yet taken up even one of our Bioethics Advisory Commission recommendations."

Dr. Sandy Thomas, director of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in London, agreed it comes down to the influence of anti-abortion activists in Washington.

"We just don't have that," Thomas said. Americans "are not going to get the same green light as fast. Britain has a much more liberal approach to reproductive medicine."

On Monday, Britain's Parliament approved new regulations that legalize the destruction of embryos for stem cell research. And in what experts say is a global first, Parliament permitted cloning to create human embryos for the research.