The man who will clone our cells

Antony Barnett and Robin McKie talk to the scientist whose focus on genetic copies might one day help medicine to tackle all diseases

Miodrag Stojkovic is an unlikely scientific hero for Britain. Thirteen years ago he was working as a veterinary researcher at Belgrade University when war and ethnic cleansing swept his native land. 'I wanted nothing to do with that stupid war,' he told The Observer last week. So Stojkovic - the son of a Serbian father and a Macedonian mother - fled for Hamburg where he used his medical knowledge to get a job as a nurse treating Aids and cancer patients.

For two years he worked in the city's hospital, learning German, before restarting his veterinary research career at Munich University. It was here he realised the enormous potential of stem cell science as a route to developing cures for diseases.

'It was clear to me that this was where the future of medical research lay,' he said. Stem cells act as parent cells for all the other types of tissue found in the human body. If we can understand how they develop into skin, brain, gut, and bone, doctors believe they will be ideal for replacing organs and tissue ravaged by diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, diabetes, and other degenerative illnesses.

But there was one serious obstacle for Stojkovic. Germany remains deeply suspicious of genetics research and the Serbian scientist found it impossible to get funding or approval for his work. So once again, he moved on, taking a post - in 2002 - as a researcher at Newcastle University's Institute of Genetics, where he began working with Professor Alison Murdoch, head of the university's Centre for Life and chair of the British Fertility Centre. 'We were very lucky to recruit somebody like Miodrag with his knowledge and experience,' Murdoch said last week.

For the past two years, Stojkovic has been working on stem cells as a means for treating diabetes. It is first-class work, but not particularly remarkable from the public's point of view. In a few days, Stojkovic's anonymity is likely to disappear abruptly when the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) gives, as expected, its approval for the researcher to make the first human clones created in Europe.

However, the aim of this ground-breaking work is not to generate carbon copies of human beings - a process known as reproductive cloning. It is to use eggs - left over from failed in vitro fertilisation treatments - as tiny biological factories for supplying lines of stem cells. This process is called therapeutic cloning and the stem cells produced in this way will become the focus of an intense research effort by the Newcastle team.

'British law was changed a couple of years ago to ban reproductive human cloning in Britain but to permit therapeutic cloning,' said Simon Best, chairman of the Biotechnology Industry Association in Scotland. 'At the time, there were all sorts of alarmist stories about scientists lining up to do all kinds of irresponsible experiments using cloned embryos. In fact, nothing has happened - until now. Scientists have taken a long, long time to act and to take a very measured look at this sort of work before deciding to proceed very carefully and slowly. This application has been long in gestation and preparation.'

What Stojkovic plans to do is - if nothing else - audacious. He will take a single cell from a patient suffering from juvenile diabetes, remove its nucleus - the part that carries its total complement of DNA, its genes - and insert this into an egg cell, left over from IVF and whose genes have already been removed. The resulting embryo will then be nurtured in chemicals to persuade it to grow and divide. This is exactly the same technique that was used to create Dolly the sheep at the Roslin Institute, in 1996.

After a few days, the embryo will consist of a ball of cells, including the inner cell mass which would normally grow up to form the foetus. This mass consists of 20 to 50 stem cells which can be isolated and put in culture dishes. 'The aim will be simple,' said Stojkovic. 'We will try to get these stem cells to grow indefinitely in the laboratory.'

Scientists have already developed stem cell lines, though they are notoriously tricky to grow up and maintain. However, the ones that Stojkovic will create will be special. They will be genetically and immunologically identical to each of the diabetes patients that provided an initial skin cell sample. And that is crucial. 'Israeli scientists have recently shown how to take stem cells and turn them into the beta pancreatic cells that are destroyed in diabetes patients,' said Stojkovic. 'However, these are genetically dissimilar to most diabetes patients and are likely to raise an immune reaction when injected back into patients - unless powerful suppressants are given. Our cells will be of the same geno type - because they were created through the process of cloning - and should not raise immune problems.'

This, in a nutshell, is the raison d'etre of the therapeutic cloner: to bypass the problems of immune rejection when trying to replace tissue destroyed by degenerative illness. It is only an early step in the battle against these diseases, however. The millions of individuals with diabetes - not to mention the millions with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases - are far too heavy a case load for doctors to consider treating through this process.

However, therapeutic cloning is viewed only as a necessary first step for coping with degenerative illness. Once researchers have worked out how to turn stem cells into neurones or pancreas cells, they will try to reverse the path. They will try to turn skin cells firstly into stem cells and then into pancreas cells. This is known as reprogramming, and if it is ultimately successful it will allow doctors to take a skin cell from a person with diabetes or Parkinson's and use that to create immunologically perfect tissue that can be injected into a patient to cure their condition. Such a prospect is remote, but until scientists carry out the kind of work that Stojkovic is planning, it will remain forever out of reach.

This will not stop various special interest groups objecting to his work, including anti-abortion groups who see sanctity in every embryo no matter how it is created. Murdoch is unimpressed. 'We are not making potential babies,' she said. 'The cells we are using have no more moral status than blood we take from a patient.'

Not all opponents of this kind of work are anti-abortion campaigners, however. Some people claim that Stojkovic is pioneering work that will only make it easier for rogue researchers to carry out reproductive cloning work. 'This is very unlikely to produce anything medically useful, but it will be a great help for those who want to clone babies,' David King, director of Human Genetics Alert, told The Observer.

King is one of the signatories of a letter to Suzi Leather, head of the HFEA, warning the authority not to approve the research. Other signatories include Dr Fleur Fisher, former Head of Ethics at the British Medical Association, Dr Bill Albert of the British Council of Disabled People and a member of the government's Human Genetics Commission, and Dr Michael Antoniou, a gene therapy researcher. In addition, the voices of anti-abortion groups, a vociferous lobby of MPs, including Ann Widdecombe, the Catholic church, and various other religious bodies can all be expected to vent their fury.

Stojkovic may have left the rage of war behind in his homeland, but he has yet to escape the fire of controversy.