Bush presses for human cloning ban

Human cloning is highly controversial

President George Bush has urged the United States Senate to ban all research on human cloning.

"Life is a creation, not a commodity," he said in a speech on Wednesday.

"As we seek to preserve human life, we must also preserve human dignity - and therefore we must prevent human cloning by stopping it before it starts."

It would be a mistake for the US Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber

President Bush

Mr Bush was speaking to an audience of doctors, scientists, religious activists and people with disabilities. He was speaking in support of a bill to ban cloning expected to be debated soon in the Senate.

The president said that anything short of a full ban would be unethical, and nearly impossible to enforce.

"As we seek what is possible, we must always ask what is right, and we must not forget that even the most noble ends do not justify any means," he said.

Total ban

The House of Representatives passed a similar bill last July banning the production of all embryos that are the genetic twin of a donor.

Many in the Senate oppose using cloning to create human beings, but there is more support for so-called therapeutic cloning - creating embryonic stem cells for use in research and the potential treatment of disease.

President Bush has never hidden his dislike for human cloning research

The use of embryonic stem cells is controversial because a living human embryo is destroyed in order for the cells to be extracted.

Senators are currently considering two approaches: one which would ban all human cloning research; the other which would ban reproductive cloning but allow therapeutic cloning.

In supporting a total ban, Mr Bush said: "It would be a mistake for the US Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber."

He added that obtaining success from cloning research was "highly speculative".

Restricted funding

The BBC's science correspondent Richard Black says that President Bush has never hidden his distaste for human cloning research.

In August last year he decided to restrict federal funding on stem cell experiments, saying he "recoiled at the idea of growing human beings for spare body parts or creating life for our convenience".

Senator Robert Frist also announced his support for the cloning ban

According to a recent opinion poll, four out of five Americans feel the same way.

The movement for a complete ban received another significant boost on Tuesday, when Senator Bill Frist declared his support.

Senator Frist, a former heart transplant surgeon, is the Senate's only doctor and it is thought he will play an influential role.

Creating a human embryo "for reason of experimentation leads to destruction of that embryo - and to me that is morally unacceptable," Mr Frist told reporters.

The issue has been given added impetus in the last few days by the claim from an Italian fertility doctor, Severino Antinori, that he has implanted an embryo clone in a woman.

If the Senate does ban therapeutic as well as reproductive cloning, it will bring the US broadly into line with other countries such as Germany, Australia and Japan.

The UK, however, permits such research under strict licence.