WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Using current cloning technology to help infertile couples have babies would be premature and thus unethical, a top U.S. reproductive ethics advisory group said on Monday.

The same technology that produced Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned, in 1997, might help some couples have babies, but it is too soon and too uncertain, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine's (ASRM) ethics committee said.

Any attempt to use somatic cell nuclear transfer to clone a human being at this time is scientifically premature and thus unethical,'' John Robertson, co-chair of the committee, said in a statement.

However, related research efforts should be allowed to continue and those of us in the ethics community should continue to discuss under what circumstances, if any, its use would be ethical.''

Somatic cell nuclear transfer involves scraping the nucleus out of an egg and replacing it with the nucleus, which carries most of the DNA, of another cell. The method can be used to clone an animal, such as Dolly, and the various mice, pigs, cows and other animals that have been cloned.

But it can also be used to help an infertile woman have a child that is genetically hers, or to help an infertile man have a son that is a virtual identical twin of himself.

As long as the safety of reproductive somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) is uncertain, ethical issues have been insufficiently explored and infertile couples have alternatives for conception, the use of reproductive somatic cell nuclear transfer by medical professionals does not meet standards of ethical acceptability,'' the committee added.

In general, medical and ethics groups feel that experiments that involve living human embryos border on the unethical, although there is wider debate about the use of dead embryos, including aborted or miscarried embryos and fetuses.

Putting the important social and psychological issues aside for a moment, any physician who participated in human cloning at this time would be doing human experimentation without the necessary first steps of successful trials in animals and approval from the appropriate Institutional Review Board (IRB),'' said ASRM president Michael Soules.

"This would be both unethical and unprofessional behavior on his/her part.''

(From Reuters)