MADRID—The Council of Europe, seeking a common framework for legislation regulating experiments on human embryos in its 21 member nations, is considering a new report by a Spanish physician on the ethics and biology of such research.
In his report, Marcelo Palacios, a Socialist member of Spain’s parliament, endorses the increasingly accepted view that a fertilized human egg becomes an embryo 14 days after conception. The pre-embryo, he suggests, could be used for experimentation—but only with the explicit written consent of the donors of the reproductive material.
The Council of Europe’s Committee on Science and Technology will discuss Palacios’ report this month before sending it on to the Committee of Ministers. One year ago, the Council’s Assembly recommended that its member nations bar the creation of identical human beings by cloning or other methods, implantation of a human embryo in the uterus of an animal (or vice versa), genetic manipulation...
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