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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...