Dolly creator seeks human cloning
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-09-29 09:03

One of the creators of Dolly the sheep, the world's first mammal cloned from an adult, said Tuesday he was seeking permission to create cloned human embryos for medical research.

Dolly was created at Scotland's Roslin Institute in 1996.

Ian Wilmut, who led the team that created Dolly at Scotland's Roslin Institute in 1996, said he had applied for a license from the government's fertility authority to clone cells from sufferers of motor neuron disease to discover how the debilitating condition develops.

"We owe it to the people who suffer from it and are going to suffer from it in the future to try and develop treatments for them," Wilmut said.

The Roslin Institute said in April it was considering applying for a therapeutic cloning license but had not yet done so.

Britain legalized therapeutic cloning in 2001, becoming the first country in the world to do so.

The Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority granted the country's first license for human cloning last month to a team at Newcastle University that hopes to create insulin-producing cells that could be transplanted into diabetics.

Such work is opposed by abortion foes and other biological conservatives because researchers must destroy human embryos to harvest the cells.

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