WASHINGTON

Almost as soon as President Bill Clinton's proposed law to outlaw human cloning reached the US Congress last week, it became evident that it does not go far enough for many Republicans.

Conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate promised to push for a tougher law to ban permanently not only human cloning for the purposes of reproduction, but also the use of cloning in the private sector to create research embryos not intended for implantation.

Clinton's Cloning Prohibition Act has been drafted in response to the recommendations of the president's National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC). It would ban for five years “any attempt to create a human being using somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning”, the method used by Scottish scientists who announced in February that they had cloned Dolly the sheep (see Nature 385, 810–813; 1997.

The act would impose a fine of at least $250,000 on anyone caught attempting to do so, and additional profits would be liable to seizure. The NBAC would be required to recommend whether the law should be renewed as its expiry date approached.

The bill has not been introduced in Congress, a procedure that requires a member of the House or Senate to sponsor it. None has stepped forward to do so, although it was not clear last week whether this is due to reticence or to simple procedural delays.

But, at hearings in the House and Senate last week, two politicians who have already introduced anti-cloning bills of their own complained that the Clinton measure — and the NBAC recommendations on which it is founded — are morally inadequate.

Senator Christopher Bond (Republican, Missouri) complained that the NBAC had avoided a politically charged issue by remaining silent about embryos created by cloning but not implanted. He said: “By allowing cloning research on human embryos in the private sector, the commission said: ‘Go ahead as far as you can; when it gets dangerous then we'll try and stop you’.”

Bond said this approach — also implicit in the Clinton bill — “risks sliding very far down the slope” to human cloning and that tighter controls were necessary.

Both Bond and Congressman Vern Ehlers (Republican, Michigan) insisted that any legal ban should be permanent. Ehlers, a physicist by training, has introduced two bills — one to outlaw cloning for the purposes of reproduction, and the other to outlaw research toward this goal.

Ehlers said that the House would not stay silent on whether to allow private production of cloned embryos for research.

He suggested that any debate would require the House to discuss a broader question — why human embryo research should be allowed in the private sector at all. Current US law bans federally funded human embryo research in which embryos are harmed or destroyed, but such research is allowed in the private sector.

At the House hearing, even liberal politicians questioned the consistency of the NBAC recommendation. Sheila Jackson Lee (Democrat, Texas) declared that the question of unrestricted activity in the private sector “looms”.

“How do you [rationalize] that bifurcated” recommendation, she asked Harold Shapiro, the NBAC chairman and president of Princeton University. Shapiro responded that different standards apply when contentious moral questions relate to taxpayer-financed activities as opposed to private ones.

George Annas, professor of law and public health at Boston University, suggested that, for anti-abortionists, the Clinton bill is “the worst of both worlds”, as it allows the creation of research embryos in the private sector, and requires their destruction.

Annas speculated that Congress was more likely to prohibit all research on human embryos than explicitly to sanction research on human embryos with no chance of implantation. He also said that Congress was unlikely to be content with the civil penalties in the Clinton bill.

“The president's [bill says] it's wrong to do this because it puts the [resulting] children at a very grave risk of genetic harm,” Annas said. “I think Congress will determine this is a felony.”