WHO Says Human Cloning
Would be Unethical
The World Health Organization (WHO) said that any use of cloning techniques to create identical humans was unacceptable and suggested that experiments in this direction should be banned.WHO considers the use of cloning for the replication of human individuals to be ethically unacceptable, Hiroshi Nakajima, director-general of the United Nations agency, said in a statement.
Such actions, he added, would violate some of the basic principles which govern medically assisted procreation including respect for human dignity and protection of human genetic material.
The statement was issued in the wake of a forecast by British researchers who have successfully cloned a sheep that human cloning could be a reality in one or two years if scientists wanted to do it.
A British newspaper reported that a Belgian doctor may have accidentally created the first-known human clone some four years ago as the result of a technique developed to improve the success rate of fertility treatment.
In his statement, Nakajima recalled that a special WHO group of research into medically-assisted human reproduction and related ethical issues had voiced support for maintaining the freedom of scientific research.
But the group had also stressed that there was a universal consensus on the need to prohibit extreme forms of experimentation, such as human cloning, the WHO chief said.
WHO would like to propose that these guiding principles should serve as a starting point for the public debate required at national and international level to establish the necessary norms and safeguards, Nakajima added.
But opposition to human cloning should not lead to an indiscriminate ban on all cloning procedures and research which were important in the fight against cancer and other diseases.
Animal cloning also offers opportunities to advance biomedical research on diagnosis and treatment of diseases affecting human beings, Nakajima declared.
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