Vatican City
A Vatican panel issued a stinging condemnation of human cloning Tuesday
and
warned against the misuse of genetic information. Human cloning, it
said,
"represents a grave attack on the dignity of conception and on the
right to
an unrepeatable, unpredetermined set of genes." The Pontifical
Academy on
Life also warned that using genetic information to
"suppress"
malformed or diseased embryos and fetuses amounts to a new form
of
"selective eugenics." The statement came at the end of the
academy's
three-day conference at the Vatican. The report wrapped up a year
of study on
the potential effects of current research into human genetics.
The Vatican has
in the past called for a ban on human cloning and also
forbids abortion. People
should be conceived and born "in a human way," it
has said. In an
earlier report, the academy said human cloning would not
result in identical
souls because only God can create a soul.