UK Government's Court of Appeal challenge puts cloning legislation back on track
The UK Court of Appeal has allowed the Government to challenge a High Court decision which effectively undermined legislation designed to regulate cloning. On 16 January Government lawyers appeared before the Appeal Court to argue that the creation of embryos using cell nuclear transfer (CNR), the technique used to create Dolly the Sheep, could be controlled under the 1990 Human fertilisation and embryology Act. The ruling means that researchers will be free to carry out cloning research. Lord Phillips, the Master of the Rolls, allowed the appeal saying: 'I hold that an organism which is CNR falls within the definition of the Human fertilisation and embryology Act.' The appeal follows a judgement in November when Mr Justice Crane said that an organism created using CNR was not an embryo and was therefore not covered by the Act. The judgement was made after anti-abortion campaigners drew attention to the Act's definition of an embryo as the union of an egg cell and a sperm cell, a process which does not take place during the CNR technique. The Pro-Life Alliance said this meant that all cloning experiments in the UK could not be properly licensed and called for a review of the legislation governing embryology research. In December last year the Government rushed the Human reproductive cloning Bill through Parliament to make it illegal to implant an embryo that had not been created through the fertilisation process in the womb.