Chinese Connection Beats Ban on Cloning-style Fertility Technique

An experimental fertility technique, tested on five women in China because it would be banned in the US and UK, was condemned yesterday as perilously close to procedures used in cloning and in any case unethical.

One woman became pregnant with triplet embryos, one of which survived 29 weeks - the first human pregnancy using a cell nuclear transfer of the sort that produced the cloned sheep Dolly.

Technically it was not cloning because the embryo contained DNA from the mother and father (and a tiny amount from the egg donor) but it used techniques outlawed in the UK due to their potential for use in cloning.

The pregnancy was a collaboration between physicians at Sun Yat-Sen medical university in China and an American professor warned by US regulators not to attempt such experiments at home.

At the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas, yesterday, the team published their work but would not discuss its ethics.

They took eggs from five women and fertilised them in a test tube. They also fertilised eggs from anonymous donors. The nuclei of the donated eggs was removed, and replaced with the DNA-containing nuclei of eggs from the five. These eggs were put back in their wombs. One woman became pregnant with triplets. An operation was done to "reduce" the embryos to two in the interests of maintaining the pregnancy, but the remaining two also died, the final one at 29 weeks.

"It is not legal in this country because it uses precisely the same techniques as cloning. It is transferring genetic material from one person's embryo to another person's egg," said Richard Kennedy, secretary of the British Fertility Society. "We wouldn't support it because of the meddling that you are undertaking with the cellular structure of the egg. It is highly experimental."

James Grifo, director of reproductive endocrinology at New York university, was the senior on the team. According to the Wall Street Journal, he has twice been warned by the US food and drug administration not to continue research into nuclear transfer. The Chinese experiment was not approved by his university.

Prof Grifo believes the technique could benefit those women whose eggs are defective because of problems with the mitochondria - the shell surrounding the DNA. It is surmised this may be one reason why older women's eggs do not so readily implant in the womb lining.

Simon Fishel, director of the pioneering Nottingham fertility clinic CARE at the Park hospital, said that, although "the technology itself is yet to be proven safe or even understood", it held the possibility of allowing some women to have a baby genetically their own. "There is no doubt there is a whole range of disorders that relate to mitochondrial diseases."

Lord Robert Winston, professor of fertility studies at Imperial College, London, said it was an unethical experiment which had no justification. "It is just a piece of rubbish, which you get at these meetings. There is a lot of concern that what is a respectable technology is being jeopardised."

The abstract, which has John Zhang, a New York university fellow, as lead author, said the two remaining babies were normal. The first was delivered premature after its amniotic sac broke, but died of respiratory failure. A month later the woman got an infection, the umbilical cord failed, she delivered prematurely and that second baby also died. The scientists argued they might have survived in the US.

China on Friday banned human cloning, trading in eggs for profit, and controls on experiments on eggs and sperm in the name of fertility.