The Church of Scotland has rejected claims by two U.S. research groups to have found an ethical solution to the moral-religious objections to human embryonic stem cell research.

|TOP|Advanced Cell Technologies have developed a new method which removes a single cell from an eight cell mouse, leaving the other seven for implantation into the mouse womb and ‘unharmed’. The result has been apparently normal pregnancies in around half of the cases.

The director of the Church of Scotland’s Society, Religion and Technology Project, Dr Donald Bruce, however, rejected ACT’s claims that the new method overcomes ethical dilemmas regarding stem cell research.

“In the eight cell embryo method, you would be morally obliged to implant the remaining seven cell embryo to make a baby for the ethical argument to be valid,” he said. “Many might object that it was too instrumental towards a future human baby to remove an eighth of its substance, not for its own sake, but for use as a medical resource for research or making cells for therapy.

“They might consider that the inherent human dignity of a real future human being was violated.”

Meanwhile, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research has adapted the nuclear transfer cloning technique used in Dolly the sheep to create mouse embryos that cannot implant into the womb, and from which they extract embryonic stem cells, resulting in a non-viable embryo.

|QUOTE|The procedure also faces the risk that the embryo may be lost if the seven cells fail to re-implant successfully.

However, a press release by the Church of Scotland highlighted objections by opponents of stem cell research, which argue that it is unethical to genetically modify human cells to make an embryo non-viable because it is engineering into it a disability which denies its potential to develop.

Dr Bruce said: “Technical fixes like these do not often solve ethical dilemmas. The viability of the embryo is not the only crucial issue here.

“Christians in the UK are divided on the use of embryos to make stem cells. For many of those who see the embryo as a human person I doubt that either method would solve the basic ethical problem.”