The United Nations deferred a decision on a total ban on human cloning following two days of impassioned testimony from United Nations member nations last week -- the second such action in two years.  

About 60 countries, including the United States, support a Costa Rican proposal to ban all human cloning.

But 20 others, including the United Kingdom and Japan, along with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, back a more flexible Belgian proposition. That plan would outlaw reproductive cloning but allow each nation to draft its own laws about therapeutic cloning, whereby cells from cloned embryos are used for medical research but not to produce cloned babies.

The latter is obviously more practical given that many countries are already moving ahead with stem-cell research.

Scientific exploration in human cloning is inevitable.

Britain granted a group of scientists at a university a first-ever license to begin therapeutic cloning efforts in August. Earlier this year, scientists in the Republic of Korea became the first to successfully clone human embryos.

Instead of pretending that a total ban on human cloning will stop it from occurring, we humans would be much better served by allowing cloning in a controlled environment.

Laboratories around the world are working on technologies related to cloning. It may enable us to better understand, if not overcome, a number of diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and diabetes, for which there is no present medical cure.

Unrestricted cloning can have many serious consequences. It is just possible that many will try to capitalize on cloning by marketing the "perfect child" or by directing cloning toward militaristic and other antagonistic goals.

Like many other new technologies, cloning may do us good, or harm.

Banning it altogether is easy and convenient. By doing that, we deny ourselves tremendous opportunities.

Legislative means are needed to guarantee that the cloning technology is properly used to advance human quality of life by helping to eliminate forms of human suffering.

When a global consensus is nearly impossible to reach, as it is for the time being, the best we can do in attempting to control an unstoppable step forward in scientific progress is to closely monitor it through national legislation.

(China Daily October 27, 2004)