Charities such as Life would like to see more work done to follow up research showing that adult stem cells, instead of embryonic ones, could be used to develop tissues and organs. Now religious leaders are urging the House of Lords to fight government plans to rush through laws legalising human cloning. The Archbishop of Canterbury has joined forces with the Roman Catholic archbishops of Glasgow and Westminster, the Chief Rabbi and the President of the Muslim College, to protest at the way the Government is changing the law to allow testing on stem cells derived from therapeutic cloning of human embryos. In 1997 Dolly the sheep became the world's first mammal cloned from an adult cell. It was part of a project to try to make human recipients less likely to reject pig organs after a transplant operation.
Researchers try to alter pig genes and then clone the modified pigs as a source of organs.
Some pig parts like valves are currently used in areas like heart transplants. But funding for the controversial project was recently halted amid fears that pig viruses could be passed on to humans. The technique used to produce Dolly, and other clones since, involved removing the genetic material from an egg and replacing it with the nucleus of a cell from an adult sheep. The reconstructed eggs were then grown in a lab for a few days before being implanted in a womb to develop into a clone. However, Dolly was the only success, an achievement rate far below 1 per cent.