Lord Harries has been in the line of fire before, as the man who sparked the debate about homosexual bishops by nominating a gay priest as an Anglican bishop several years ago. More relevant to his current responsibilities is the fact that he has no qualms about tinkering with embryos. "I don't feel troubled in my conscience about it because, as I say, I don't regard that very early embryo, which is just a small bundle of multiplying cells, as having the rights of a human being," he told the London Times in a wide-ranging interview. He also supports abortion, although he is troubled by abortion on demand.

Even within IVF circles Lord Harries views are liberal. He does not mind using IVF to help grandmothers have babies and he does not believe that the welfare of a child includes the need for a father. That should go," he said. "I don't think it's very useful because I think studies have shown that two people of the same sex together can be good parents."

Although Sherley also regards human embryos as human beings, with a right not to be experimented upon, he supported his ethical concerns with scientific arguments. First, if cloned animals notoriously have serious birth defects, cloned embryos must also have them, making tissues derived from them dangerous and ineffective.

Second, cloned embryonic stem cells normally form tumours when transplanted into adult tissues. Third, the continuous renewal and repair of tissue is the work of adult stem cells. Embryonic stem cells might be able to replace adult tissues, but they will not replace the adult stem cells.

Even the proposal to use cloned human embryos to investigate adult disease mechanisms has no scientific legs. The worth of such studies will be limited by the inherent genetic defects in cloned embryos and, fundamentally, diseases that arise in the adult are not likely to manifest until later in embryonic development, if at all before birth," he wrote in the Australian newspaper.

A North Korean refugee doctor, Ri Kwang-chol, says that deformed babies are killed soon after birth. "There are no people with physical defects in North Korea," he told a seminar in Seoul.