Clock ticking on human cloning ban
United Nations experts are warning in a new study that human cloning is so close to becoming a reality that the world must move quickly either to ban it or pass laws to protect cloned humans from “potential abuse, prejudice and discrimination,” Reuters reported.
“Whichever path the international community chooses, it will have to act soon,” Dr. A.H. Zakri, head of the UN University’s Institute of Advanced Studies, told Reuters. The institute is based in Yokohama, Japan.
In 2005, the UN approved a non-binding declaration to ban human cloning. But Dr. Brendan Tobin with the National University of Ireland, who co-authored the study, said that document “in itself is not an adequate response,” because it allows “maverick scientists [to] carry on with their research and that is likely to lead to an eventual cloning.”
But as co-author Dr. Chamundeeswari Kuppuswamy, a law lecturer at Sheffield University, warned in the Daily Telegraph, “The state of the science at the present time, however, means that there are going to be a lot of failures and deformities in any clones produced, which is one of the major concerns if it goes on unregulated.”
Fifty countries, according to the study, have passed laws banning human reproductive cloning – including Canada, which banned the practice in 2004 – but nearly three times as many countries have no such laws.
