uman cloning pioneer Michael West yesterday said his Worcester-based company, flush with cash from investors, would aggressively continue its work on cloned embryos undeterred by strident talk in Washington of banning human cloning.
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Two weeks ago, West's company, Advanced Cell Technology, said it had cloned the first human embryos on record, drawing enormous attention. Calls for banning all human cloning immediately sounded in Congress. President Bush said he was prepared to sign a ban into law.
Interviewed after a Harvard Medical School forum last night, West said he would not move his work overseas if a ban were enacted. Several scientists left the country for foreign research positions after Bush enacted restrictions on stem cell work last summer.
''I would never leave this country. This is the greatest nation in the world,'' he said, adding that his company ''would respect the ban, though it wouldn't be fair to patients.''
Despite the controversy, West said his small company's financial prospects have improved over the last two weeks.
''There's a lot of interest that investors have had'' since the announcement, said West, declining to discuss details.
During Thanksgiving weekend, West's team announced it had successfully inserted adult DNA into a donated egg, then coaxed it to develop into a cluster of cells, the earliest stage of a human.
West said he hopes to be able to create cloned embryos of patients in order to extract stem cells. These primordial cells might then be grown into life-saving tissue that is genetically identical to the patient, eliminating the complications that occur when a body tries to reject implanted tissue. But the science to do this is at least a decade away, say researchers.
West joined several ethicists and researchers at Harvard Medical School for a discussion of the political and moral dimensions of human cloning and stem cell research. He revealed that ACT is preparing to publish work on another feat of biology that is expected to stimulate discussion and blur boundaries: parthenogenesis. That is when an unfertilized egg cell is fooled, with chemicals, into developing early embryonic cells as if it were fertilized. He said the work has been submitted for publication in the journal Science.
West described the efforts to ban cloning as part of a ''lynch-mob mentality'' driven by confusion over language. West himself referred to ACT's work as ''reconstructed human embryo by nuclear transfer.''
''Much of the public debate is a misunderstanding of the word `embryo,''' he said, noting that when people are reminded that the cloned embryos are the size of pinpoint, their view on the issue invariably tilts toward his.
At the end of the program, an exhausted West, who has criscrossed the nation in the last two weeks to lecture on his firm's breakthrough, was asked by Harvard officials if he required security guards to escort him out. He declined.
