A Bill has been introduced in the US Congress that would impose a Federal ban on the cloning of humans (see
report in PhRMA's Genomics: A global resource). The Bill would outlaw the carrying out of a "cloning procedure" with the intent of transferring the resulting product into a uterus. Significantly, the Bill would also ban so-called "therapeutic cloning", because it forbids the transfer of a human somatic cell nucleus into an enucleated egg cell. President Bush has indicated that he would support passage of the Bill, which has now been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary. In 1997, Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, banned the use of federal funds for human cloning research. The US Food and Drug Administration says it currently has powers to ban reproductive cloning on safety grounds, but there are fears that this sanction may not be strong enough as some privately-funded groups in the US have already announced that they intend to go ahead with attempts to clone humans. In the UK, Parliament recently passed legislation that explicitly bans reproductive cloning, but permits therapeutic cloning for the purpose of research on the use of embryonic stem cells to treat disease. Embryos created by this means would have to be discarded after a maximum of 14 days.