Tokyo

Japan looks set to end its bar on therapeutic cloning, giving it the chance to compete with Britain, China and similar countries in fast-moving areas of biology such as stem-cell research.

On 23 June, the bioethics committee of the Council for Science and Technology Policy, Japan's main scientific decision-making body, voted to lift a three-year moratorium on therapeutic cloning by ten votes to five. The main council is expected to endorse the decision shortly. But rules to govern the procedure, which the committee will have to clarify before research can go ahead, will probably take a year or more to establish.

Therapeutic cloning involves creating an embryo by transferring the nucleus from a patient's cell to an egg cell stripped of its own nucleus. This clone yields stem cells that can develop into any of the body's tissues and may have the potential to repair the patient's organs. It promises much, but opponents say the research is advancing too quickly given ethical questions over its use of human eggs.

Shin-ichi Nishikawa, a committee member and stem-cell biologist at RIKEN's Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, voted for the change, but worries that no plan has been agreed to allow research to start. “Considering the slow speed of decision-making in Japan, it is difficult to forecast when actual experiments with nuclear-transfer stem cells will be allowed,” he says.

However, fellow committee member Motoya Katsuki, director of the National Institute for Basic Biology in Okazaki, says that the scientific and ethical problems that caused the moratorium to be put in place have not been solved. Katsuki, an embryologist who works with mice as models, opposed the lifting of the moratorium and says that abnormalities in cloned animals are still not properly understood. This could lead to wasteful experiments on human eggs, he adds. “From an ethical perspective we should avoid experimentation on human specimens as much as possible.”

Controversy over the vote could erode vital popular support. Those against lifting the ban say there was not sufficient time for discussion, and some media reports have described the decision as a “forced consensus”.

Over the next two weeks, the bioethics committee is expected to work out how to implement its decision.