Hearings opened at the US Congress last Wednesday looking at evidence on the possibility of cloning humans. Lawmakers in the US now say they are considering formally banning human cloning after hearing evidence that the technology might produce abnormal babies and would be 'reckless and irresponsible' to undertake.
An official from the US Food and Drug Administration said that permission for cloning could currently only be denied for safety reasons. But the White House has said that President Bush would sign a federal law making human cloning illegal and Congress now seems eager to send him the legislation.
The congressional hearing received testimonies from pro-cloning US fertility specialist Panayiotis Zavos of the University of Kentucky, who has already announced that he intends to try cloning within the next year, and the leader of Clonaid, a program supported by the Raelian group that wants to clone the dead child of a couple in the group.
Cloning humans is opposed by scientists, religious groups and politicians. Scientists believe that cloning techniques are not developed enough to be able to justify trying them on humans. Ian Wilmut, from the Roslin Institute where Dolly was cloned, and American colleague Professor Rudolf Jaenisch from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said in an article for Science that attempting to clone human beings at this time would be 'dangerous and irresponsible'. They warned that four years of cloning experiments on animals had shown the technique to be 'deeply flawed' with a high miscarriage and deformity rate, and that there is 'no reason to believe that the outcomes of attempted human cloning will be any different'. Despite concerns, currently only four US states and 12 countries worldwide have banned human cloning.
Meanwhile, President Bush and Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services, have received another letter from 112 university presidents, urging them to allow federal funding of research on embryonic stem cells.
Sources and References
-
US politicians criticise human cloning efforts
-
Dolly's creator says no to human cloning
-
Congressional hearings on human cloning
-
Lawmakers propose human cloning ban, alien order notwithstanding
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.