Warnock: 'No ethical reason to ban cloning'

Mary Warnock, the distinguished philosopher who shaped British law governing human fertilisation and embryology, has endorsed the cloning of babies in order to treat infertile couples.

Lady Warnock said there are no major ethical obstacles to human reproductive cloning for strictly medical reasons at some point in the future providing the technique can be shown to be safe.

In an interview with The Independent prior to the publication of her new book on the ethics of "making babies", Lady Warnock said current legislation banning human cloning was premature and the way it was rushed through Parliament last year made Britain look foolish.

Lady Warnock, the chairwoman of the Committee of Enquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology, whose report framed the 1990 legislation on IVF, said: "It is perhaps a pity that Britain has joined the rest of Europe in an absolute ban on such cloning. If it [cloning] becomes a procedure which is, relatively speaking, safe then it seems to me there needs to be a lot of thought before it is absolutely ruled out.

"I can envisage a time, not in the foreseeable future but one day, when it became safe or relatively safe to produce human clones ... and when it might be a remedy for infertility which some people might think worth exploring," she added.

"And, therefore, the criminalisation of it seems to be a bit hasty.... We haven't tried it in humans but I'm sure it will be done."

The Government introduced an emergency Bill outlawing reproductive cloning in November after a High Court judge ruled that the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act did not cover cloned embryos.

There were fears that the loophole would allow an expert, such as Severino Antinori, an Italian fertility specialist, to use Britain as a base to carry out attempts at creating the first cloned baby.

However, Lady Warnock believes such fears were misplaced as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) had already stated it would not countenance giving a licence to anybody attempting human reproductive cloning.

She said: "I think in any way it made us look rather fools to do it in this very precipitant way.... I was just slightly ashamed of us when we rushed into this legislation because of the wild threats of Professor Antinori."

Cloning in animals has a high risk of congenital deformities and other birth defects. It is also extremely inefficient and wasteful – it took 277 attempts to clone Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell.

However, scientists have shown the process can be made more efficient and safe, so much so that some believe it may one day be feasible to offer cloning as a treatment for some forms of male infertility – providing it can be shown to be safe in animals.

Lady Warnock said many objections to human cloning are irrational and based on the misguided notion that it would be used by a malign dictator to produce copies of himself or an underclass of compliant drones.

"I think the fears about cloning are not the fears it would be terrible if some individual couple had a cloned baby, so much as a kind of political fear which is expressed in the mythology of Brave New World," she said.

"If, on the other hand, human cloning were regarded as a remedy for the individual couple who wanted to have children, and each application to produce a cloned baby were regarded and examined separately, then perhaps a licence issued for the clonings would go ahead."