Researchers have also been able to make bone marrow cells turn into liver cells, offering hope that specialised cells can be made to regress and redirect themselves to form different types of cells. However, as the law stands, scientists can only work with stem cells less than two weeks old to carry out research into understanding fertility, reproduction or congenital disorders. There is considerable controversy surrounding the issue of therapeutic cloning and stem cell research. While the extracted cells could never become a baby, religious and pro-life groups argue cloning for any experimentation breaks the sanctity of human life and should never be accepted. But removal of these cells kills the human beings from which they are taken.
Therapeutic cloning means killing.
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.