Britain set to become a 'magnet' for top US scientists

Britain could become the centre of a reverse brain drain with talented American scientists coming to the UK to exploit the country's liberal attitude on human cloning and stem-cell research, a leading scientist said yesterday.

Peter Raven, the director of the Missouri Botanical Gardens in St Louis and the new president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), said that Britain could become a magnet for US biotechnologists who feel restricted by President George Bush's opposition to cloning for medical purposes.

Professor Raven said it was unfortunate that there had not been a clear enough distinction made between human cloning to produce babies and cloning to produce the embryonic stem cells, which promises to revolutionise medicine.

"This is not the time to reproduce human beings [by cloning], and stem-cell research, that is cloning of individual cell lines, is highly important therapeutically. It ought to be allowed," Professor Raven said at the AAAS meeting in Boston.

"I personally regret that the analogies between the two have led President Bush so far to conclude that the latter should be severely limited. I seriously hope that he will seriously modify his position," the professor said.

"If the present position holds out, it's likely that some people will want to emigrate from the United States to get into the places where they can do the kind of research that does hold such promise for human health and for scientific advance." Britain, he said, was one country where scientists could be drawn.