The Urgency for Legal Regulation of the Practices of Cloning and Stem Cell Research

• Author: Geraldine Cleere B.A
• Position: This essay was awarded second prize in the Annual Law Reform Student Essay Competition, 2004
• Pages: 37-47

1

The Urgency for Legal Regulation of the Practices of Cloning and Stem

Cell Research

Geraldine Cleere B.A*

Introduction

"The ability to turn blood into liver would be the envy of the alchemists of former times.

Turning stem cells into 'therapeutic gold' will probably rest on our ability to identify the

mechanisms by which tissue-derived stem cells respond to environmental cues and

execute new developmental decisions.”1 \To develop legislation for such an area as

cloning and stem cell research is a governmental nightmare. An ethical minefield coupled

with the rapid advances in the area ensures most governments place the issue on the long

finger until it can be ignored no longer. The Irish government has indeed fallen foul of

this rule. The issue has come before them in a European context recently and this alone

caused a major storm. With no domestic legislation in the area and an increasing bio

pharmaceutical presence in this country it is an area which must be legislated for, and

soon. After all “controls, regulations and safeguards are far better than a free-for-all”2.

On February 23, 1997, Dolly the Sheep was cloned by Scottish scientists. It was from that

point that genuine ethical concerns were raised about the possibility of cloning humans.

With so much publicity surrounding the field of genetics and its related areas it is little

wonder that much of the terminology inherent with the area is confused and it is difficult

for the lay person to determine one practice from another. It is true that cloning and stem

cell research are very much related but from a procedural and an ethical point of view the

differences between the two are quite significant.

Cloning

There are two main categories of cloning, reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning.

*This essay was awarded second prize in the Annual Law Reform Student E ssay Competition, 2004.

1 Stuart H. Orkin, Nature Medicine, November 2000, Vol. 6, Number 11, p. 1 212 at 1213.

2 An Tainiste, Mary Harney quoted in Fionán Sheehan, Fianna Fáil Split d eepens over stem cell research,

The Irish Examiner, 26th November 2003.