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In a warning shot in the battle on human cloning, a conservative Republican has introduced a bill banning federal payments to any business, institution or organization that “engages in human cloning or human cloning techniques”.

Paul: wants funding ban.

Congressman Ron Paul (Republican, Texas), a former obstetrician and gynaecologist, says his bill has been crafted to avoid inhibiting research: “It just means that universities and medical centres that set out to clone people get their funds cut off.” But biomedical researchers have described the proposal as “massively punishing”.

The bill, which was introduced two weeks ago, has so far won no co-sponsors, and Paul, a junior member of Congress, has little power to move it without patronage from more senior Republicans. However, it is symbolic of conservative opinion on cloning.

David Korn, senior vice-president for biomedical and health sciences research at the Association of American Medical Colleges, says the bill goes further than the existing ban on human embryo research, as it would cut all federal funding to institutions where researchers use somatic-cell nuclear transfer, even if they do so with private funds. (The present ban allows privately funded embryo research.)

Furthermore, says Larry Goldstein, a professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego, the definition of ‘human cloning’ in the bill is so ambiguous as to potentially prohibit stem-cell research.

The bill defines human cloning as “making an identical ⃛ copy of the genetic material of an individual ⃛ so as to cultivate one or more new human cells which could, if not otherwise engineered, develop into a new individual human being”.

While it is believed that stem cells isolated from unused embryos left over from fertility treatments could not grow into a human if they were implanted in a uterus (Nature 396, 104; 1998), this is not known for certain and cannot be proved without experiments that are themselves considered unethical. As a result, says Goldstein, the bill would at the least allow legal challenges to stem-cell work.

Paul disputes that interpretation, saying that stem-cell research would be protected. But he makes no apologies for seeking to ban any cloning that would produce a human embryo not destined for life, even though this technique could aid the development of cell and tissue therapies.

Meanwhile, the American Society for Cell Biology met around 30 representatives of scientific and patient groups last week to discuss their approach to the stem-cell research issue on Capitol Hill. Forty-five groups have signed a letter to Congress applauding a recent legal opinion by the Department of Health and Human Services that federal funding of stem-cell research is allowed under the current law (Nature 397, 185; 1999 ).