Several US lawmakers said Wednesday they would try to outlaw human cloning, after scientists raised the possibility that the cloning would create babies with defects
Several US lawmakers said Wednesday they will try to outlaw human cloning, after scientists raised the possibility that cloning would create babies with defects. Several members of the House of Representatives said they believe Congress should impose an outright ban on human cloning. Despite the criticism, two groups have announced that they are continuing with the plan to use human cloning for childless couples.
Fertility expert Panos Zavos, who works with an Italian doctor to try to help infertile couples, said the cloning technique is suitable for these circumstances. Zavos said his team would be able to check the condition of the embryo before implanting it in the woman's womb, but other researchers questioned that possibility. Zavos' team plans to use the same cloning techniques as those used in the case of Dolly the sheep. The team stated that it was establishing a project in an unknown country in the Middle East, far from the reach of American law. More than 700 couples have already volunteered to participate in the project.
But the legislators are not satisfied with this initiative, despite the good intentions. "The grim evidence of deformities, deformities and deaths discovered in cloned animals is a stark warning," said Republican Jim Greenwood.
Kathryn Zon, Director of the Department of Biological Research at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said that the administration can currently ban human cloning experiments for safety reasons. Whoever violates this prohibition is expected to be fined 100 thousand dollars and a year in prison.
The legislators support increasing the government's powers on the issue. Democrat Peter Deutsch said: "The members of the committee on the subject feel that there is a general agreement that we must ban human cloning unequivocally and completely." The White House said that President George W. Bush opposes human cloning and is ready to work with Congress for legislation on the subject. "He opposes it for moral reasons," said House Speaker Ari Fleischer.
Apart from the moral aspect, some scientists are concerned about the high chance of failures and defects observed in cloned animals, since the era of cloning began four years ago with the cloning of Dolly the sheep. "Most cloned animals are so deformed that they die shortly after birth," said one of Dolly's creators, Rudolph Janich. In an article published on Wednesday in Science magazine, Janich expresses his opposition to human cloning, mainly because of the high failure rate and because the technology for detecting genetic abnormalities, which is used in routine pregnancy tests, is not able to detect problems of epigenetic programming (the process in which the embryo develops from the materials in the egg) . Defective programming may lead to distorted expressions of each and every gene, as indeed seen in the animals that have been cloned so far.
