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cloning is the technique which produced
Dolly the sheep who was the first uh
animal to be produced as a clone of
another adult that process is commonly
called reproductive cloning on the other
hand in other areas of research had we
taken the embryo and cultured it in
order to obtain embryo stem cells for
research or for therapy that would
commonly be known as therapeutic
cloning when you consider using the
cloning technique in humans there are
many ethical implications that
arise you could use the technique to
produce a child in reproductive cloning
when you have to consider the
implications for that child what would
it be like to be a genetically identical
twin of somebody else perhaps close to
the the Clone
child my own view is that the
psychological imp ation for that child
would be intolerable because we would
all expect the Clone to be like the
original in principle is that you create
can create copies of existing persons
and I'm very much against that the
Islamic perspective about cloning is
that it will not
accept reproductive
cloning but it certainly will promote uh
therapeutic cloning because there is an
enormous amount of benefit that can ACR
from this technology all the cells that
you produce from the embryonic stem
cells they could be identical to the
patient who will receive the cells and
then you would avoid
rejection
but it presents problems because you
require donated eggs for every single
Ember you create if you look at the vast
number of patients you may be talking
about this would lead to demands of
donation of human eggs on a scale beyond
anything uh which would be normally
acceptable for a fairly invasive
treatment which can be painful and it's
not completely risk-free it seems that
this method will be very costly and it
will be very difficult if you think of
it as use to treat specific
diseases so there could be other
Alternatives that need to be explored
for example if you have a stem cell bank
or stem cell repository you could you
could use that as a starting point
instead
now the important thing would be of
course where the eggs for this purpose
is derived from and if you can get the
eggs from a woman who has willingly
donated this and has
consented for research to be done on
these eggs it's not a problem is Islam
will readily recognize that I think that
there are both physiological and
psychological implications for women who
are being invited to donate the hormone
treatment necessary to induce AC
ulations does have unpleasant side
effects although they would be very
small there must also be a risk of a
reduction in potential fertility
subsequent to the treatment and in this
regard we have suggested that women
should only be allowed to donate after
they've had children I think it's
difficult to imagine how women would
feel if they dona an egg which is then
used to produce an embryo because it's
really a step towards producing an
embryo and it's very important that the
people concerned because I think the
partner uh should also be included in
these discussions that they accept that
an embryo is being produced that might
have the ability to become a child but
which is not going to be allowed to be
uh become a child because the cells are
going to be used for research and for
some people that would be uh something
that they I think could not contemplate
but we are confident from the
correspondence that we've had that there
are some women for whom this would be an
important thing for them to do over time
therapeutic cloning can contribute to
research into a great range of inherited
diseases and I think in the main women
come forward because they've seen the
suffering that can occur after someone's
developed one of these conditions and
believe that they can contribute perhaps
not to the treatment of that person
because research will take too long for
that to be possible but to to the
treatment of other people in the future
who will develop these
diseases