Call for ban on 'cowboy cloners'

The Royal Society (the UK's national academy of science) has called for a worldwide ban on what it calls 'cowboy cloners': scientists and groups who say they are carrying out human reproductive cloning. It has also released a set of guidelines, aimed at helping people to decide whether human cloning claims are credible. The announcements follow a press conference given by controversial fertility doctor Panayiotis Zavos last week, at which he said he had recently transferred a cloned human embryo to a 35-year old woman. His unsubstantiated claims were widely reported by the UK and international media, but were met with scepticism and condemnation by the scientific community.

Lord Robert May, President of the Royal Society, criticised Zavos and other would-be human cloners, calling them 'mavericks who claim to be engaged in practices that are widely acknowledged as medically unsafe, scientifically unsound and socially unacceptable'. His comments were made in an article published at the start of the meeting of the World Economic Forum, being held in Davos, Switzerland. He also questioned whether it was even technically possible to clone humans, given the reported difficulties of cloning primates compared to other mammals.

May went on to accuse advocates of human reproductive cloning as 'more motivated by the publicity of carrying out such experiments, in the face of overwhelming scientific and medical opinion, than by a genuine regard for the plight of the human guinea pigs that would suffer'. He said that human cloning claims caused public anxiety, 'particularly when accompanied by a flurry of publicity'. An open letter to the media, signed by May and other experts, called upon journalists not to publicise unsubstantiated cloning claims. Disproportionate coverage given to such stories could convey the impression that fertility scientists in general were engaged in the race to clone the first human being, they wrote.

The Royal Society and other scientific institutions, including the US National Academy of Sciences, has previously called for a worldwide ban on attempts to clone human beings, whilst allowing individual countries to regulate research into 'therapeutic cloning' (the use of cells from cloned early human embryos to develop new disease treatments). The United Nations failed to reach an agreement on a global human cloning treaty recently, when it considered competing resolutions for a total cloning ban, and a ban on reproductive cloning only. It is due to consider the issue again in December 2004.