LONDON — The British government moved Thursday to ease public fears about new gene technologies by announcing plans to outlaw human reproductive cloning and steps to prevent insurance companies from using genetic tests to limit coverage.
At the same time, genetic tests for diseases such as breast cancer are to be made more readily available through the National Health Service.
Health Secretary Alan Milburn said Britain must harness the benefits of gene technologies for health care and "jettison its downsides."
"The genetics revolution has already begun. It is not going to go away," Milburn told a meeting of scientists and doctors in the northern city of Newcastle. "Genetic advances can be a force for good, but that requires active preparation."
He said current licensing restrictions are insufficient to ensure that human reproductive cloning--copying human beings--never occurs in Britain. New laws may also be necessary to prevent the creation of a "genetic underclass" by insurance companies seeking to exclude people with an inherited risk for certain diseases, he added.
"Human cloning should be banned by law, not just by license," Milburn said.
Health Department officials said Britain stood to become the first country to make human cloning a criminal offense. However, they gave no timetable for the introduction of legislation, saying only that it would be in "the next available Parliament, when it can be fitted in."
The announcement, coming ahead of a June 7 general election, could win the government favor with British voters, who overwhelmingly oppose cloning for the production of babies.
The government's Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, the body that regulates genetic research, consulted the public on the issue in 1997 and found that the vast majority of experts and average Britons believed that human reproductive cloning should not be allowed. Subsequent polls have confirmed the public opposition, and no such research is licensed in the country.
The government does, however, support "therapeutic cloning" of human embryos to be used for research into the causes and treatments of diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. A law allowing such embryo research to go forward has passed both houses of Parliament, but its implementation has been held up by a court challenge from an anti-abortion group.
