UN Split Over Therapeutic Cloning

The United Nations will today decide whether to include a total ban of therapeutic cloning in its global convention on human cloning.

The Royal Society, the UK's most influential academy of sciences, was today asking the government not to sign the convention if it includes a ban on therapeutic cloning.

Voting at the UN general assembly is due to start in New York at 3pm GMT today. If a first motion - which proposes postponing the draft until 2005 - is voted down, delegates will vote on a convention drafted by Cost Rica and backed by the US which would outlaw human and therapeutic alternatives. Should that be lost, delegates will consider a second convention from Belgium - backed by the UK - which would outlaw human cloning but allow individual countries to decide on therapeutic cloning.

If therapeutic cloning is banned outright, then the Royal Society want the British Government to refuse to sign up to the convention.

Therapeutic cloning involves the cloning of cells to develop medical treatments. It is hoped that the techniques will one day allow doctors to "grow" new organs from a patient's own cells for a transplant process which would cut the risk of rejection.

Lord May of Oxford, president of the Royal Society, said: "The convention proposed by Belgium is consistent with an Inter Academy Panel statement signed by 66 of the world's scientific academies, including the Royal Society and the United States National Academy of Sciences. It is therefore surprising that the United States is ignoring this advice and instead is campaigning at the United Nations for a blanket worldwide ban on therapeutic cloning.

"It is particularly ironic that countries such as the United States should be so keen to ban therapeutic cloning as they have so far failed to introduce national legislation against it, or even human reproductive cloning."

Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, St Kitts and St Nevis, St Vincent and the Grenadines (represented by the Caribbean Academy of Sciences), Dominican Republic, Georgia, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Philippines, Tajikistan, Uganda, and the United States are all backing the ban on therapeutic cloning.

However Lord May did back the plans to ban cloning of human beings. "There is widespread agreement among scientific and medical experts and the public that human reproductive cloning should be banned across the world, yet only 30 countries have laws against it. Governments should now act to outlaw the cowboy cloners."