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The British government has formally given its blessing to gene therapy,
weeks after the country’s first trial of an experimental treatment was approved.
In a written answer to a parliamentary question last week, the junior health
minister, Tom Sackville, announced that ministers have accepted the recommendations
of the Clothier report, published more than a year ago, into the ethics
of gene therapy.

As recommended by the Clothier committee, an advisory group will be
formed to review proposals from researchers who want to conduct trials of
gene therapy. Until now the Clothier committee itself has had to fulfil
this function. It has already approved a trial of gene therapy for a child
with a severe immune deficiency (This Week, 6 February). Some scientists
complained late last year that the government had dragged its feet over
the approval of the Clothier committee’s report (This Week, 12 December
1992).

The aim of gene therapy is to treat individuals with inherited disease
by inserting a healthy copy of a faulty or missing gene into cells in the
patient’s body. At present no researchers are planning to try therapies
that would alter the egg or sperm and thus allow changes to be passed on
to subsequent generations. The Clothier committee said that such ‘germline’
therapy should not yet be contemplated and the government has accepted this
recommendation.