Asia rejects nightmare vision of cloned humans
( 2001-08-12 12:57 ) (7 )

Much of Asia recoiled in horror as Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" moved closer to reality with Italian embryologist Severino Antinori's plans for "designer babies" cloned in the image of their parent.

Muslims in Indonesia and Pakistan, Buddhists in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Thailand and Roman Catholics in the Philippines spoke with one voice when they said human cloning was meddling with the laws of nature.

"Who do they think they are, they are not gods," said an official in Taiwan, referring to Antinori and his colleagues who said they would within weeks begin to clone a human being, with the aim of offering hope to sterile couples.

According to Antinori, the nucleus of a woman's body cell is transferred into one of her eggs to begin the process which eventually leads to the creation of an embryo.

The embryo is then transferred into the woman's uterus to establish pregnancy.

"It is against the laws of nature," said another official, surnamed Shih. "A baby should be born of two sets of genes, not one."

Buddhists believe in reincarnation and according to the Hong Kong Buddhist Association life starts when the soul reaches the body.

"This life is determined by what you did in your last life," said a spokeswoman, adding that the nuns and monks found the concept of "human duplication" so incomprehensible that they did not want to talk about it.

Hong Kong has banned human cloning and is keen to develop its fledgling biotech industries which rely upon cells taken from human embryos for research.

Draft laws are also being considered in Malaysia, Thailand and Australia.

In Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-populated nation with over 80 percent of its more than 210 million people following Islam, there is little to suggest that Antinori would be able to peddle human "photocopies" to infertile couples there.

"As you know yourself, this is an issue which is not acceptable to religions, including Islam," said Sri Astuti Sudarso Suparmanto who heads the health ministry's research and development board.

Pakistan, another devout Muslim country, said cloning interfered with God's will, which was a sin under Islamic law. "It should be banned," said a spokesman for the main fundamentalist party, the Jamaat-i-Islami.

Yet despite the outcry, only Japan has enacted legislation to outlaw human cloning, and many countries are facing pressure from scientists to allow research on human embryos.

In May, Japan's cloning law came into effect carrying a 10-year jail sentence for anyone caught trying to clone a human being and laid out strict guidelines for scientists on research on human embryos.

Gynaecologist and artificial insemination expert Atsushi Tanaka in southern Tokyo said: "It is horrifying to think we would clone human beings despite the amount of negative data on cloning.

"The act of human cloning violates the very meaning of our existence."

Antinori has yet to say in which country he will carry out his experiments, but there are fears that without strict legislation some countries in Asia, desperate for foreign investment, could become research laboratories for human cloning.

New Zealand's Independent Biotechnology Advisory Council has warned that legislation is needed urgently if it is to prevent such a thing happening there.

IBAC chairwoman Anne Dickinson said: "If we don't put legislation into place we become a target country for people to do things they are not allowed to do in their own countries."

France has called for sanctions to be slapped on countries found to allow human cloning experiments.

Scientists have warned that cloning humans is infinitely trickier than cloning an animal. They fear that the by-product of creating one healthy human child will be the hundreds of deformed or abnormal human embryos that will have to be culled.

In the Philippines, where the Roman Catholic Church has a huge influence, bishops have equated this destruction as tantamount to murder.

"It is the subject of human rights, foremost which is the right to life," Archbishop Leonardo Legasi said.

Yet the issue is equally charged among scientists who see human embryo research as crucial for curing diseases from Parkinson's to paralysis.

In South Korea, a bill to ban human cloning has been stalled in parliament since May following opposition by scientists.

"Human embryo cloning is the most fundamental technology necessary for curing human-kind diseases," a statement by 300 scientists of the state-financed Korea research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology said.

"To solve the pain of human-kind, suffering incurable diseases, would be boosting human dignity."