Asia rejects nightmare vision of cloned humans

Asia rejects nightmare vision of cloned humans

By Cassie Biggs

HONG KONG (AFP): 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 a
government official in predominantly Buddhist 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 Taiwanese
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 while a draft law is before
Taiwan's parliament, yet both are keen to develop their 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.

Even in China, where the administration is devoutly atheist,
authorities said they opposed human cloning on ethical grounds.

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.

Gynecologist 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."