Warning over stem cell proposal
Professor Ian Wilmut has joined with other scientists to express "profound concerns" that the European Court of Justice is considering a test case which could make it unlawful on moral grounds to patent applications using embryonic stem cells.
Prof Wilmut, of the University of Edinburgh - who led the team which produced Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal - is among the group of 13 leading researchers who have expressed their fears in a letter published in the journal Nature.
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Hide AdProf Wilmut, who also heads the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine in Edinburgh, and the researchers said: "The advocate-general's opinion represents a blow to years of effort to derive biomedical applications from embryonic stem cells in areas such as drug development and cell-replacement therapy.
"If implemented, European discoveries could be translated into applications elsewhere, at a potential cost to the European citizen."
Peter Kearney, spokesman for the Catholic Media Office in Scotland, said: "With stem cell research a life is ended. Not a potential life, a life with potential. This shouldn't happen to a human life at its most helpless."