In response to an Italian doctor's announcement about the fertilization of 200 women from one cell; The US passed an anti-cloning law
Germany and France have called on the United Nations to consider imposing an international ban on human cloning - the French Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday. Their request came after an Italian doctor announced his intention to start cloning humans. Religious organizations condemned the doctor's announcement, and the European Commission expressed its fear of implementation His intention. The UN is expected to discuss the issue at the next session of the General Assembly, in September.
Dr. Severino Antinori, director of a fertility clinic in Rome, said this week that he intends to fertilize 200 women with embryos cloned from the cell of a single adult. Antinori's research was controversial even before his cloning plans. He used mice as an incubator for human sperm, and helped a daughter 62 to get pregnant by transplanting an egg from a donor. Scientists reacted with skepticism to his plan, noting that experiments Cloning animals showed low success rates.
Even before Dr. Antinori's statement, the foreign ministers of France and Germany, Hubert and Derin and Joschka Fischer, expressed their opposition to the idea of cloning at a meeting in June in Berlin. The newspaper "Herald Tribune" quoted the spokesman of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bernard Valero, who said: "This is an important issue for all humanity. France and Germany treat cloning as against human dignity." The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs claims that the World Declaration on the Human Genome Project and Human Rights, adopted by UNESCO in 1997, essentially prohibits human cloning.
The US, Japan and the UN have already expressed opposition to human cloning, and Japan and the US are also considering anti-cloning legislation. Last week, the US Congress approved a bill banning cloning of any kind, both for research purposes and for reproductive purposes. Britain is the only country in Europe that has banned to the Human Cloning Law, although it allows limited cloning of stem cells for research purposes.
The United Nations Scientific and Educational Organization, UNESCO, and the World Health Organization have already presented an international resolution against cloning. But their decision is not legally binding. The European Council said it opposes human cloning on moral grounds, but lacks the legal power to stop Antinori.
Many scientists regard cloning as an essential tool in stem cell research - research in embryonic cells designed to create tissue to treat damaged organs. The only treatment currently available for damaged organs is transplantation. The use of cloning will make it possible to create the same cells instead of collecting them from embryos, obtained through fertility clinics or abortions.