The medical promise of therapeutic cloning has been oversold and its unreasonably high profile risks turning the public against more promising aspects of stem-cell research, according to one of Britain’s most respected experts in the field.

Cloning research “clearly upsets the general public” yet it has limited potential for treating disease and adds little to scientific understanding of human biology, according to Professor Austin Smith of the University of Cambridge.

While it is in theory possible that cloned embryonic stem (ES) cells could be used to create patient-matched tissue for treating disease, significant technical barriers mean that this goal may never be realised in practice, he told The Times.

Research with ordinary stem cells taken from surplus IVF embryos and adult tissue is less controversial and more likely to lead to medical benefits, but has been given much less public attention.

The hype surrounding cloning has encouraged the mistaken view that it is essential to all stem-cell work, and left the whole field tarnished by the scandal surrounding Woo-Suk Hwang, the disgraced Korean scientist who faked his cloning research.

While some cloning experiments proceed for the sake of intellectual curiosity, the research community should be much clearer about the limitations, Professor Smith said. “Its prominence is out of proportion to the significance of what’s being done, and there are real question marks about whether it has any utility at all,” he said.

Professor Smith would prefer scientists to focus on basic understanding of ES cells and adult stem cells, both of which will be studied in depth at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research in Cambridge, which officially opens today. He recently moved from the University of Edinburgh to become its first director.

Professor Smith was also critical of efforts to devise new ways of collecting ES cells without destroying human embryos, which some scientists have promoted as “more ethical” sources of the tissue. These eye-catching experiments actually play into the hands of embryo-rights groups who will always object to ES cell research, by suggesting that scientists are uncomfortable with the ethics of existing techniques.

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