LONDON The Royal Society —an independent body of scientists in the UK — has called for an international moratorium on human reproductive cloning, in a report published on June 20.
The report was prepared in response to queries raised by the ongoing inquiry by a UK government body, the House of Lords Ad Hoc Committee on stem cell research. Richard Gardner, Henry Dale Research Professor of the Royal Society, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, chaired the working group that prepared the Society's evidence. He said: "There has been a lot of unchallenged publicity this year for groups who claim that they will clone human beings in the next few years. It is the Royal Society's view that this would be unethical and that responsible scientists across the world should not ignore the public's well-founded opposition to such research."
The Society report proposed several scientific arguments against human reproductive cloning, ...
