President Clinton has said that the US Government will draft legislation to ban human cloning.

But the US President also said that the America is likely to allow some aspects of cloning research using human cells.

The President was speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Philadephia.

Prof Lee Silver, Princeton University: if the technology is safe, then cloning is not a bad idea (2'18")

Last month 19 European countries signed an agreement outlawing human cloning. But some of Europe's most influential countries, including Germany and Britain, did not sign.

The ethical debate over whether human beings should be cloned was into sharp focus in January by the announcement by a US scientist that he was ready to clone a human being within three months.

But most scientists at the conference agreed that it would not be ethically acceptable to develop reproductive cloning of humans.

But the feared science fiction vision of the future where human babies can be created from a single adult cell is still some way off in practical terms.

It took Dr Ian Wilmut and his team at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh 270 attempts before they managed to successfully clone Dolly from a single cell of an adult sheep.

BBC science correspondent Martin Redfern said: "Dolly created a sensation among scientists and public alike. One speaker at the AAAS compared her birth to the first flight by the Wright brothers: a great achievement but not a cause to start a passenger airline."

Dolly doctor defends cloning

Dolly: Probably the world's best known sheep

In fact the Dolly experiment has proved so hard to replicate that some critics have said the famous sheep may not have come from an adult cell at all.

To silence his critics Dr Wilmut hinted at the meeting of the AAAS that he may be in the process of repeating the experiment.

The scientist also defended cloning technology and said it was needed to treat both disease and infertility. But he agreed that human cloning was "ethically unacceptable".

Dolly was cloned by sucking the nucleus out of one cell - in her case a cell taken from a mammary gland - and fusing it into another sheep's egg cell from which the nucleus had been removed.

New York researchers have said they would like to use this method to treat infertile older women whose cell DNA is damaged.

In this case they would transfer the nuclei from their egg cells into the healthy eggs cells of younger women.

Dr Wilmut said that cloning technology was also needed to create embryos as a source of tissue for treating diseases such as Parkinson's and muscular dystrophy.

He said it was possible that cells from embryos less than a week old, perhaps cloned from the patients themselves, could be manipulated and then injected into the brains of Parkinson's patients to replace damaged brain cells.
 

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