JAPAN TO IMPRISON CLONING OFFENDERS

March 7, 2000

TOKYO (Yomiuri Shimbun) -- A draft bill to ban attempts at cloning beings would punish offenders with prison sentences and other penalties, Science and Technology Agency sources said Monday.

The agency, the Justice Ministry and other relevant authorities are working to determine how many years lawbreakers should serve in prison. They are likely to conclude that offenders should be jailed for three to seven years, according to the sources.

The bill would outlaw attempts to produce human beings who have genes identical to those of actual persons through methods that dispense with human reproductive functions. The bill's authors conclude that such attempts represent a blatant challenge to human dignity.

The bill would also ban attempts to clone embryos. It would, however, allow scientists to conduct experiments of that nature under certain conditions in individual cases. To achieve this aim, the government has included in the bill a set of guidelines to be followed by researchers seeking to carry out such testing.

Scientists claim that cloning technology could achieve medical breakthroughs. For instance, doctors may be able to perform organ transplants entirely free from a conflict of immunologic funtions between a donor and a patient, using organs produced by cloning embryos.

The guidelines say that cloning techniques have been useful in treating animals, adding that scientsits should be allowed to experiment with this technology only in cases in which they are seeking treatments for patients for whom no other cure is available.

A Liberal Democratic Party panel later approved the draft. The Cabinet is expected to finalize the bill -- probably by the end of the month -- as it hopes to submit the bill to the current Diet session.

Nonetheless, government officials are split over how many years lawbreakers should serve in prison. It is extremely difficult to determine what kind of impact cloning will have on humans, according to observers.

There is no domestic law that could set a precedent for punishment for offenders, the sources said.

Article 1 of the bill defines cloned human beings as individual organisms who have genes identical to those of actual persons. The article bans cloning human beings, saying that it is still unknown whether cloned humans would be able to grow up like ordinary humans.

"Cloning could seriously affect the protection of human dignitity and life as well as the wholesomeness of the human body," the article says.

A human could be cloned by harvesting an unfertilized egg and then removing the nucleus that carries genetic information from the egg. The nucleus of a somatic cell from the skin of an adult could be transplanted into the egg to form a cloned embryo, which would then be left to grow. The cloned embryo would be replanted in the womb.

In the hope of preventing the reproduction of a human organism, the bill bans attempts to replant cloned embryos in the womb.

The bill calls for strict punshiments such as prison sentences, according to the sources, because it would be extremely difficult to define the legal status of a cloned human and protect the human rights of such individuals.

The bill also would ban attempts to produce hybrid embryos -- a mix of human sperm and a nonhuman ovum, or the other way around -- and replant them in the womb. The bill would also outlaw the reproduction of a chimera embryo -- a mix of a human embryo and an animal cell -- and the replantation of such embryos in the womb, human or nonhuman.

According to the sources, it would be unclear whether such an organism were a human or nonhuman animal.