When a Scottish research team startled the world by revealing 3 months ago that it had cloned an adult sheep, President Clinton moved swiftly. Declaring that he was opposed to using this unusual animal husbandrytechnique to clone humans, he ordered that federal funds not be used for such an experiment - although no one had proposed to do so - and asked an independent panel of experts chaired by Princeton President Harold Shapiro to report back to the White house in 90 days with recommendations for a national policy on human cloning. That group - the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) - has been working feverishly to put its wisdom on paper, and at a meeting on 17 May, members agreed on near-final draft of their recommendations.

NBAC will ask that Clinton's 90-day ban on federal funds for human cloning be extendedindefinitely, and possibly that it be made law. But NBAC members are planning to word the recommendationnarrowly to avoid new restrictions on research that involves the cloning of human DNA or cells - routine in molecular biology. The panel has not yet reached agreement on a crucial question, however, whether to recommend legislation that would make it a crime for private funding to be used for human cloning.

In a draft preface to the recommendations, discussed at the 17 May meeting, Shapiro suggested that the panel had found a broad consensus that it would be "morally unacceptable to attempt to create a human child by adult nuclear cloning." Shapiro explained during the meeting that the moral doubt stems mainly from fears about the risk to the health of the child. The panel then informally accepted several general conclusions, although some details have not been settled.

NBAC plans to call for a continued ban on federal government funding for any attempt to clone body cell nuclei to create a child. Because current federal law already forbids the use of federal funds to create embryos (the earliest stage of human offspring before birth) for research or to knowingly endanger an embryo's life, NBAC will remain silent on embryo research.

NBAC members also indicated that they will appeal to privately funded researchers and clinics not to try clone humans by body cell nuclear transfer. But they were divided on whether to go further by calling for a federal law that would impose a complete ban on human cloning. Shapiro and most members favored an appeal for such legislation, but in a phone interview, he said this issue was still "up in the air."
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