MINISTERS must close a legal loophole that permits the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos without any regulatory oversight, leading scientists said yesterday.

The restrictive and out-of-date remit of the embryology watchdog has left it powerless to control controversial experiments in which human DNA is fused with animal eggs, leaving researchers fearful of a public backlash. While scientists consider the creation of parthuman part-animal “chimeras” justified for medical research, they think it essential that the work be properly licensed to build public confidence.

The gap in the law provides no way of blocking experiments such as those conducted abroad by Panayiotis Zavos, the maverick scientist seeking to clone a human being, who has added human DNA to cow eggs to test his technique.

Reproductive cloning is banned in Britain but experts fear that if a similar study were to take place here it might undermine support for other forms of embryo research such as therapeutic cloning.

Robin Lovell-Badge, head of developmental genetics at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, urged the Government to address the issue in its review of the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, which begins today. “The revision has to accommodate advances in what’s possible and that should include things like this,” he said. “There are some procedures that are not covered.”

The Department of Health will publish a consultation document today setting out options for overhauling the law. Many technologies that cause controversy, including the nuclear transfer technique used to create some chimera, were barely envisioned when the legislation was drawn up, leaving the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority ill-equipped to respond. Chimeras are embryonic or adult animals that combine cells from two individuals, which can be of different species. They take their name from the Greek mythological beast that had the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a snake.

They have many purposes in medical research, chiefly to determine how stem cells develop in the body. They are also used to create mouse models that mimic human biology particularly well.

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