Life advocates called plans to use hybrid human-animal embryos for research unnecessary, unnatural and reprehensible a day after British lawmakers voted to allow it.
The Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill allows researchers to empty an animal egg and fill it with human genetic material. The cloned hybrid embryos are then allowed to live for 14 days before being destroyed.
"Crossing the species barrier in this way is deeply, deeply reprehensible, undesirable," Josephine Quintavalle, a bioethicist who founded Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE), told CNN.
Human Genetics Alert (HGA), an independent watchdog, said it found defects among existing hybrid embryos that raise serious doubts about whether human-animal embryos would ever be useful.
"I'm very, very unimpressed with the scientific case for doing that," David King, a former molecular biologist who heads the HGA, told CNN. "The science is so weak and the ethical concerns are so significant."
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