US still lacks human cloning legislation...
May
2001 Volume 7 Number 5 p 518
Nature Medicine
Date accessed: 24 May 2001
Laura
Bonetta
Bethesda
In the wake of the recent and highly public announcements by two scientists that they are working towards cloning a human being, the US Congress has been holding hearings on the subject. Surprisingly, the US currently has no legislation banning such a procedure (Nature Med. 7, 257; 2001), though it is the most advanced biomedical research country in the world and one of the two scientists with human cloning intentions is based at the University of Kentucky.
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Immediately following the hearings, spokesperson Peter Sheffield announced that Congress is moving forward with an "aggressive timetable" to ban efforts in human cloning that would result in producing a child. At the same time, the White House announced that President Bush would work with Congress on a federal statute banning cloning. But this isn't fast enough for some states and five have drafted their own legislation on the matter.
Many countries have already introduced legislation banning human cloning (see Table), and the majority of mainstream scientists in the US concur with this strategy. However, in a move reminiscent of the intense lobbying by the biotechnology industry against proposed legislation in 1997—the year Dolly was cloned—the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) is supporting a voluntary moratorium for fear that a poorly worded ban could remove the possibilities for cloning embryos to grow cells and tissues for medical research (so-called 'therapeutic cloning'). "We are not prepared to support any cloning legislation at this time," says Lee Rawls, vice president for government relations at BIO.
In March, a protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine that bans human cloning went into effect. As Nature Medicine went to press, 29 European states had signed the protocol.
In the US both therapeutic and reproductive cloning are barred from federal funding, but privately funded research remains unregulated, a loophole that the private sector is exploiting. For example, via CloneConsult.com provided that two stages of qualification are passed, people can be cloned for just over $2 million (https://www.cloneconsult.com/cgi-bin/CloneConsultant.storefront). However, if a survey of 1,000 Americans published last month by the American Museum of Natural History in New York is anything to go by, the site will not be jammed: 92% responded that they do not approve of cloning to reproduce their favorite person and 86% would not support the cloning of a favorite pet.
Category: 33. Cloning