Warning over stem cell proposal

A LEADING scientist at a Scottish university has warned that patients in the UK could be denied revolutionary stem cell treatments by a controversial legal recommendation which could threaten the future of the biotech industry.

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.

Prof 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."