German daily urges total ban on human cloning worldwide.

(From BBC Monitoring International Reports)

A commentary in the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung argues that there should be a total worldwide ban on human cloning as the technology is the same for reproductive and so-called "therapeutic cloning". The following is the text of Werner Bartens commentary by German newspaper Die Tageszeitung web site on 16 February entitled "There is no such thing as a little bit of cloning":

For some time, it has been quiet on the front of stem cell researchers and clone prophets: no UFO sect, no crashed Italian gynaecologist, not even a few madcap Americans who wanted to have themselves or their nearest and dearest cloned. Yet mischief does not rest. Before the awkwardly stalking Mars rovers with their colourful pictures threatened to direct public interest too strongly to a different "Utopistan", Korean scientists have put medicine back into its proper place and have cloned human embryos. …