Britain's leading academic body has called for a worldwide ban on human reproductive cloning. It also wants guarantees however that certain types of cloning experiments that could lead to new medical treatments be allowed to continue.
The Royal Society called for an international moratorium on any attempt to clone human beings in its submission to a House of Lords ad-hoc committee. "We think that a ban on reproductive cloning would have public support and is currently justified on scientific grounds," stated Prof Richard Gardner, who chaired the group that prepared the report.
"Our experiments with animals suggest that there would be a very real danger of creating seriously handicapped individuals if anybody tries to implant cloned human embryos into the womb."
The report argues, however, that research which could facilitate attempts to clone a human be allowed to continue. Britain introduced legislation last January legalising "therapeutic cloning", which involves producing copies of very young embryos that are never allowed to develop into a foetus.
Findings from therapeutic cloning research could be applied in human cloning but its purpose is very different. The cloned embryos provide a source of stem cells, which in turn could provide revolutionary new medical treatments in the future. Potentially, stem cells could be used to produce transplants for brain, bone, skin and heart tissues and could be used against certain diseases.
The report acknowledged that the stem cell research could increase the likelihood of reproductive cloning being carried out where it was not outlawed.
A number of groups around the world have already claimed they would be cloning human beings within a few years using the technology that produced Dolly the cloned sheep. This type of experimentation is illegal in Ireland on constitutional and medical ethics grounds.
