Stephen Leahy
BROOKLIN, Canada, Nov 13 2007 (IPS) – As scientists master the technology to clone primates, some legal experts worry that human clones are no longer in the realm of science fiction, and wonder what legal rights they would have in the absence of an international ban on the practice.
A nine-week-old human embryo Credit: Ed Uthman, MD
More than a dozen animal species have been cloned in the last decade, including sheep, cows, dogs and pigs. Just last summer, a U.S. research team reported the first-ever cloning of a primate. A rhesus monkey embryo was cloned from adult cells and then grown to generate stem cells.
Human clones are absolutely inevitable, says Brendan Tobin, a barrister with the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland, who researched a United Nations University (UNU) report on the issue.
Chances are clones will soon be sharing the planet with us, Tobin told IPS.
And they may well be welcomed as a new way of reproduction for the tens of millions of infertile couples, says, Tobin who co-authored the UNU report Is Human Reproductive Cloning Inevitable: Future Options for U.N. Governance, issued in October.
But what rights would a clone have? Many governments have banned human cloning. Would the clone itself be illegal? In France and other countries, it is illegal to participate in cloning activities and therefore the parents that contributed their cells for cloning could find themselves in jail.
Without an international prohibition, human reproductive cloning in certain countries could be judged perfectly legal by the International Court of Justice, the report warns.
Do human rights protections apply to clones? asks Chamundeeswari Kuppuswamy, of the School of Law of the University of Sheffield in Britain.
It #39s a unique situation that #39s likely to get very complicated, Kuppuswamy, one of the report #39s co-authors, told IPS.
Virtually every nation opposes human cloning, and more than 50 have legislated bans on such efforts. However, negotiation of an international accord foundered at the U.N. in 2005 due to bitter disagreement over research cloning, also called therapeutic cloning.
There is almost universal international consensus on the desirability of banning reproductive cloning based in part on religious and moral grounds, but mostly on concerns about underdeveloped technologies producing clones with serious deformities or degenerative diseases. Only 2 to 5 percent of cloned animal embryos grow into healthy offspring, according to a study published in the science journal Nature in February of this year.
The science is imprecise at this point, notes Tobin.
However, as technologies advance and possibilities of success increase, the current consensus is likely to erode and with it the possibility of securing a ban on reproductive cloning, he said.
While reproductive cloning is meant to duplicate a person or animal, research cloning is intended to produce tissues that genetically match those of the person or animal whose cells are cloned.
Proponents of research cloning for regenerative medicine say it offers great hope for producing replacement tissue or organs for transplantation without the fear of immunological rejection. It could offer a potential solution to the existing black market trade in body parts, such as kidneys, sold by the poor, says Kuppuswamy.
The potential scope of research or therapeutic cloning is huge. It could produce a potential cure for millions of people suffering from diabetes, stroke, spinal injury, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer #39s or Parkinson #39s.
Opponents view research cloning as the unethical production and destruction of living embryos to produce stem cells upon which such therapies are based. The clash of positions led to a compromise U.N. Declaration on Cloning, which calls for member states to enact their own bans but is legally non-binding.
There are also concerns women in the developing world would be exploited to get their eggs since large numbers of eggs are needed, Kuppuswamy says.
During the 2005 U.N. debate, countries of the global South said that rich countries ought to pay more attention to the far more devastating diseases of HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, for which cloning is of little help.
The North is still failing miserably to respond to these diseases, says Tobin.
However, failure to deal with the cloning issue reflects on the credibility of the U.N. institution itself and its capacity to respond to society #39s need for competent leadership, he says.
National efforts to outlaw reproductive cloning of humans are easily skirted if researchers can simply move to other jurisdictions. Disgraced South Korean medical researcher Woo Sook Hwang, whose human clone claims were unsubstantiated, reportedly continues his work in Thailand.
According to the UNU report, the widest international consensus would be achieved around an agreement that prevents progress towards full reproductive cloning but authorises strictly controlled therapeutic cloning to prevent the uncontrolled production and destruction of embryos.
It is highly irresponsible for the world community to not have a ban in place, says Tobin. At the very least there should be a global moratorium on reproductive cloning.
