MANY laws being introduced to ban human cloning, and some already on the
statute books, have loopholes that might allow cloners to evade them.
Human cloning by nuclear transfer, the technique used to create Dolly, isn鈥檛
even explicitly prohibited by Britain鈥檚 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology
Act, one of the world鈥檚 most thorough attempts at regulating human reproduction.
鈥淭he law bans all kinds of cloning except for the Dolly technique,鈥� says Barney
Wyld, a spokesman for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority in
London. However, he adds that anyone wanting to clone a person would have to
apply to the authority for permission鈥攚hich would be refused.
In the US, legislators have tried to ban cloning at the state and federal
levels. California has already passed an anti-cloning law and 21 other states
are considering bans. Seven federal bills have been proposed in Congress.
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Lori Andrews, an expert in the legal aspects of reproduction at the
Chicago-Kent College of Law, says that recent technological advances may make
much of that legislation obsolete. For example, at least 11 state bills and
California鈥檚 cloning ban prohibit cloning involving the replacement of a human
egg鈥檚 nucleus with that of another human cell. But researchers in Neal First鈥檚
laboratory at the University of Wisconsin at Madison have already put the DNA of
primates into cows鈥� eggs that have gone on to develop into early embryos
(This Week, 24 January, p 5).
If the same technique can produce normal human embryos,
then these laws could be circumvented.
Other loopholes are created by poor wording. At least eight state bills would
prohibit the cloning of a genetically identical person, but Andrews notes that
eggs carry mitochondrial DNA in their cytoplasm鈥攕o a clone created by
nuclear transfer would not have identical DNA.
But even an airtight law could be challenged by Americans who might claim it
infringes their constitutional right to reproduce. 鈥淭here already is an
infertile man who is thinking of challenging the California law,鈥� says Andrews.