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Posted on Feb 15, 2005, 10 a.m.
By Bill Freeman
U.N. diplomats, deadlocked for years over the drafting of treaty to ban the cloning of human beings worldwide, open negotiations on Monday on an alternative that would instead urge each government to adopt its own laws on human cloning. At the heart of the debate are stem cell studies and other research that rely on so-called therapeutic cloning, in which human embryos are cloned to obtain the cells used in the studies and are later discarded.
U.N. diplomats, deadlocked for years over the drafting of treaty to ban the cloning of human beings worldwide, open negotiations on Monday on an alternative that would instead urge each government to adopt its own laws on human cloning.
At the heart of the debate are stem cell studies and other research that rely on so-called therapeutic cloning, in which human embryos are cloned to obtain the cells used in the studies and are later discarded.
Many governments, particularly those with large Catholic populations, have argued they view this type of research, for whatever purpose, as the taking of human life.
The U.N. project dates back to 2001, when France and Germany proposed a worldwide ban on human cloning by way of a binding global treaty.
That attempt failed after the George W. Bush administration fought to broaden the ban to all cloning of human embryos, a step many scientists and governments argued would block some promising avenues of medical research.
