United Nations Set to Revisit Cloning Issue More than three years after the U.N. General Assembly passed a non-binding and intentionally ambiguous declaration opposing all human cloning, the issue is back on the world body's agenda. U.N. officials are recommending an outcome that would have the effect of distinguishing between cloning for different purposes, banning one outright but not the other. The issue will be discussed at a meeting in Paris later this month of the International Bioethics Committee (IBC) of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. An IBC working group report, released ahead of the Oct. 29-29 meeting, found the non-binding 2005 declaration deficient, and recommended a legally enforceable global ban on "reproductive cloning" – the cloning of an embryo that will be implanted in a womb, develop and be born. However, the working group did not recommend including somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) – so-called "therapeutic cloning" – in the ban. Instead, it said, "guidelines for regulating human embryo and stem cell research in the countries where it is legal, should be developed at international level." With the exception of a handful of maverick scientists and alien-worshipping cultists, the notion of reproductive cloning has been universally condemned. But the question of SCNT remains at the center of the ethical debate, as it did during the contentious wrangling leading up to the U.N.'s 2005 declaration. SCNT involves the injecting of genetic material from a patient into a human egg whose DNA has been removed. The resulting embryo will be a genetic copy of the patient. Researchers want to clone these early-stage embryos for stem cells that they hope may someday be used to treat degenerative diseases. Some proponents call this "therapeutic cloning" because of the possible future therapies that may result; pro-lifers call it "destructive" because the embryo is destroyed in the process. Differences among U.N. member states over SCNT lay behind the almost four years of sometimes acrimonious discussions leading to the March 2005 vote on the U.N. Declaration on Human Cloning. In the end it passed with a vote of only 84-34, with 37 countries abstaining, while another 36 stayed away. The declaration calls on member states "to prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life." The wording allowed for differing interpretations, and "human life" was not defined. A delegate for South Korea, a country which at the time was at the forefront of cloning experimentation, said a few weeks before the vote that "human life" meant different things in different cultures and religious, and interpretation of the term should be left to each nation. South Korea and several other countries, including Britain and China, also made it clear that they had no intention of stopping research that was underway. The move by the IBC to revisit the cloning issue at the U.N. comes at a time when more and more scientists are turning to a a new research path that sidesteps altogether the ethically-sensitive use of human embryos in the search for possible future stem cell treatments. Japanese and American scientists announced last November that human "adult" skin cells can be reprogrammed into a new kind of cell – an induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell – that shares an embryonic stem cell's pluripotency, or potential to develop into other types of cell such as blood, brain and muscle. Like stem cells from cloned embryos, the iPS cells are also genetically identical to the donor patient whose skin cells were originally used. Unlike stem cells from cloned embryos, they carry no ethical controversy. Contact: Patrick Goodenough Source: CNSNews Source URL: http://www.cnsnews.com Publish Date: October 17, 2008 Click or copy the link below to view this article in your browser: |
October 17, 2008
United Nations Set to Revisit Cloning Issue
