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Catholic World News News Feature

Human-cloning announcement prompts Vatican condemnation January 18, 2008

Reports of the first successful human cloning have drawn a quick protest from the Vatican.

Responding to a claim that the California-based Stemagen Corporation had produced a cloned human embryo, Bishop Elio Sgreccia said that such as step would be "the worst type of exploitation of a human being."

Speaking on Vatican Radio, Bishop Sgreccia, the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said that human cloning would "rank among the most morally illicit acts" possible.

The moral condemnation of cloning human embryos is all the more pressing, Bishop Sgreccia said, because recent scientific developments have shown that stem cells can be obtained by ethically licit means, from adult human tissues. The latest research on cloning, therefore, serves no useful medical purpose. The scientists involved, he said, were operating without "even the pretext of finding something" that could provide new medical cures.

Samuel Wood, the chief executive of Stemagen, said that his company's research was aimed exclusively at stimulating medical research. Wood-- whose skin cells were combined with an ovum in the cloning process-- said that he is opposed to any research that would allow the cloned embryos to be born. "It's unethical and it's illegal, and we hope no one else does it either," he said.

The reported success of the Stemagen cloning experiment has not yet been confirmed by other scientists.