CLONING BAN URGED BY GERMANY

April 29,1997

BONN (Reuter) - German scientists, haunted by memories of Nazi attempts to engineer a "master race," urged Tuesday that human cloning be banned absolutely, everywhere and forever.

And France's President Jacques Chirac announced that he would press for a worldwide ban on human cloning, a prospect raised this year when geneticists in Scotland used a cell from an adult sheep to create another virtually identical adult.

"The cloning of humans would be a violation of human existence," Wolfgang FrŸhwald, president of the German Research Association, told a news conference in Bonn.

"The cloned human would be an attack on the dignity and integrity of every single person on this earth," agreed Research Minister JŸrgen RŸttgers.

In Paris, Chirac summoned a panel of ethics experts to discuss "fears" and "fantasies" on the subject and declared: "Even if cloning is clearly banned in France, the key problem is outlawing it around the world."

German commentators reacted which special horror to news in February of the cloning of Dolly the sheep in Scotland, warning that Hitler's vision of science- bred supermen could be just around the corner.

German scientists responded by taking a tougher line than counterparts in many other countries.

While some U.S. and British scientists defend the idea of cloning human cells for medical reasons, the German expert report called on Chancellor Helmut Kohl's government to seek a worldwide ban.

"We say cloning should be banned completely," FrŸhwald said, arguing that a moratorium would not be enough. An interim ban was urged in March by the British science journal Nature, which published the breakthrough results from Scotland,

RŸttgers said human cloning was already banned in Germany and people should not think they could get around the law by trying to clone nearly identical embryos.

He said he wanted to extend the law to cover possible future scientific advances.

Germany already has some of the world's most restrictive laws on genetic engineering, applying even to food plants such as tomatoes and soybeans.

Parliament in March passed a resolution calling for a comprehensive international ban on human cloning.

One of the authors of Tuesday's report, Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, director of a Munich biochemistry institute, noted that even if human cloning was possible some of the qualities that people might want to replicate were not genetically programmed.

"What one might want to clone are not the blue eyes, but qualities -- like musical talent," Winnacker said. "If you cloned Boris Becker he would look the same, but whether he would be able to play tennis is questionable."

Under Adolf Hitler, German scientists -- who were among the most respected in the world before the Nazi era -- took part in an ignominious attempt to breed a blond, blue-eyed Aryan "master race" by exterminating people and groups they considered inferior and unfit to reproduce.