Bush prefers tight controls on cloning

The Bush administration indicated its support last week for the more prohibitive of two proposed bills on cloning: the 'Human Cloning Prohibition Act 2001' and the 'Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001'. The intention of both bills is to ban human cloning, but they differ in the extent of their provisions. The first is said to propose a ban on 'virtually all uses of SCNT (human somatic cell nuclear transfer)', and would make doing so a federal crime. The second would allow embryos to be produced by cloning techniques, but not allow them to develop into fetuses - in other words, it would ban only reproductive cloning.

Although no direct blessing was given to either bill, a spokesman from the Health and Human Services department (HHS) said that the 'more restrictive' approach was currently favoured. The HHS deputy secretary, Claude Allen, said that the second bill did not ban the creation of embryos specifically for research, and this was a 'major concern to the Administration'. He said that the other bill, sponsored by Republicans Dave Weldon and Bart Stupak, is 'consistent with Secretary Tommy Thomson's and the President's views', although he said they were not yet ready to endorse the bill until it has undergone some amendments.

Meanwhile, in the ongoing discussions on stem cell research in America, it has been reported that several Republican senators have urged President Bush to allow the use of federal funds in embryonic stem cell research. One of the senators, Orrin G Hatch, is an opponent of abortion, but believes that embryo research raises 'fundamentally different' questions. He said research with embryonic stem cells is 'consistent with bedrock pro-life, pro-family values'.