LONDON, Aug 11: Britain gave the go ahead on Wednesday for human cloning, granting a licence to scientists bidding to become the first in Europe to create stem cells used in medical research from a cloned human embryo.

The green light was given to scientists from the Centre for Life at Newcastle University, northern England, who aim to use the stem cells cloned to treat serious diseases.

However they warn it will be at least five years, if not many more, before patients could receive stem cell treatments based on their work. Stem cell technology is intended to create material that could one day treat diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's disease and other disorders, and not to make a cloned child, scientists say.

"We hope to start as soon as possible, because we have the background, we have the knowledge, we have everything here in Newcastle," the man leading the research, Doctor Miodrag Stojkovic, said.

Human embryo cloning has been pioneered in South Korea, with a team from Seoul National University announcing in February it had created stem cells using the technique. Scientists in the United States - where, legally, research must be funded privately - have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to create stem cells cloned from human embryos, Stojkovic said.

While it has been legal in Britain since 2002, such projects require authorisation from the government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), and this is the first such permission granted.

It promises to spawn fresh debate about the ethics of artificially reproducing human genetic material for scientific and medical aims. HFEA chairwoman Suzi Leather said Wednesday's decision to grant an initial one-year research licence had been taken "after careful consideration of all the scientific, ethical, legal and medical aspects of the project."

"This research is preliminary, it is not aimed at specific illnesses, but is the foundation for further development in the treatment of serious disease," she said in a written statement.

Others were not so happy. "It is very worrying indeed," said Josephine Quintavalle, from Comment On Reproductive Ethics (CORE), a leading British group opposed to science involving embryos.

"No human life should be sacrificed for the benefit of anybody else," she said. "The pro-life position on the human embryo is that no matter how you created it, it is a human embryo, it is a member of the human species, and therefore it has as much right to life as anybody else."

Stem cells are nascent cells that can be coaxed by chemical signals in the body into becoming different kinds of tissue. By far the most versatile of these are stem cells that come from embryos, for these cells can grow into almost any part of the body.

The dream is one day to use stem cells to grow replacement tissue in a lab dish, such as brain cells, skin, liver, a kidney, that could be used for human transplants. But, as decades of conventional organ transplants have shown, transplanted tissue is invariably rejected as foreign by the patient's immune system if it comes from another body.

To get around this, the search is on for cloned embryonic stem cells - stem cells which have exactly the same DNA as the patient, and thus would be accepted by his or her body as friendly rather than hostile tissue.

The cloning technique to be used at Newcastle's Centre for Life involves removing the nucleus of a human egg cell and replacing it with the nucleus from a human body cell, such as a skin cell.

The egg is then artificially stimulated causing it to divide and behave in a similar way to a standard embryo fertilised by sperm. The embryos are destroyed before they are 14-days old and never allowed to develop beyond a cluster of cells the size of a pinhead.

The eggs used are left over from in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment. They are donated by couples, and would otherwise have been destroyed. Such research is regularly denounced by a host of conservative and religious groups that argue scientists are destroying human life in the course of their experiments.

Britain has played an important role in cloning technology. Its scientists created Dolly the sheep, the world's first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. Human reproductive cloning is illegal in Britain and is punishable by a 10-year prison sentence. -AFP