Human cloning is banned in 19 European countries - January 12th, 1998

On this day in 1998, nineteen European nations signed a pact prohibiting the cloning of human beings. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class as a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that believes there's no time like the present
to learn about the past. I'm Gabe Bluzier, and in
this episode, we're talking about the first ever international treaty

(00:21):
to outlaw human cloning. The day was January twelfth, nineteen
European nations signed a pact prohibiting the cloning of human beings.
The historic signing took place in France, just a few

(00:42):
hours after its president, Jacques Chirac called for an international
ban on research involving the genetic replication of humans. The
countries that signed the agreement represented roughly half of the
member nations of the Council of Europe, an organization founded
in the wake of World War two to protect democracy
and human rights in Europe. Of the Council's forty plus

(01:06):
member states, the following nineteen signed the ban on human
cloning Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Moldova, Norway, Portugal, Romania,
San Marino, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Macedonia and Turkey. Scientific interest

(01:33):
in genetic replication arose in the late nineteenth century, at
a time when genetics was largely still a theoretical science.
The word clone was coined in nineteen o three by
plant physiologist Herbert Weber, and not long after some scientists
began practicing experimental embryology to create a clone for real.

(01:54):
In the nineteen twenties, German embryologist and Nobel laureate Hans
Spemon made strong progress on that front. He removed the
genetic material from an unfertilized salamander egg and then transferred
a nucleus from a donor cell into the empty egg.
The result was a salamander embryo with the exact same

(02:15):
genetic makeup is that of the donor or, in other words,
a clone. The technique Spemon pioneered, known as somatic cell
nuclear transfer or SCNT, was used again in nineteen fifty
three to clone northern leopard tadpoles. But the most famous
use of the nuclear transfer method by far occurred on

(02:37):
July five, nineteen ninety six. That's when Dolly the sheep,
the world's first mammal cloned from an adult semantic cell,
was born at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. The cloned lamb,
which had been named after country singer Dolly Parton, was
formally introduced to the world a year later. The presentation

(02:57):
sparked global debate about the ethics of cloning and about
whether or not the method could or should be applied
to humans. By the end of the summer, France and
other key member nations of the Council of Europe had
already begun hashing out plans for their eventual anti cloning ban.
The date of the signing was set for January twelfth,

(03:20):
and it wound up being extremely timely. That's because one
week before the meeting, Chicago based physicist Richard Seed announced
his detailed plan to set up a human cloning clinic
as quickly as possible. The Harvard educated scientist claimed he
could produce a human clone in just eighteen months, and

(03:41):
that once his facility was operational, he'd be able to
produce as many as two hundred thousand human clones each year.
As you might expect, seeds plan was widely criticized, with
many world leaders rushing to condemn it outright. Among the
first to do so was seeds own President Bill Clinton.

(04:01):
He called the scheme quote untested and unsafe and morally unacceptable,
and urged Congress to pass a ten year ban on
human cloning to allow for continued debate. Some members of
Congress wanted to go even further by banning human cloning altogether.
Richard Seed responded to the uproar by doubling down on

(04:22):
his plan to clone a human within the next two years.
He said that if Congress banned human cloning in the US,
he would simply move his operation to Tijuana, Mexico instead.
Richard Seed's threat may have been an empty one, as
many in the scientific community doubted his ability to actually
produce a viable human clone. Nonetheless, it reinforced the idea

(04:45):
that an international ban was needed. French President Shirak made
this case himself during a conference of national ethics committees
in Europe. He said, quote, nothing will be resolved by
banning certain practices in one country if scientists and doctors
can simply work on them elsewhere, and so. Less than

(05:05):
a week after Richard Seed's troubling announcement, nineteen European nations
heated Shirak's call to action. Their representatives signed an accord
on January twelfth night and it was ratified later that spring.
The agreement denounced human cloning as a misuse of science
and a violation of human dignity and identity. Nations that

(05:28):
signed the treaty agreed to enact laws prohibiting any attempt
to quote create human beings genetically identical to another human being,
whether living or dead. It's worth noting, though, that the
document made no mention of sanctions or of any other
form of repercussions for signatory nations who didn't abide by

(05:49):
the treaty, so in other words, they were more or
less working on the honor system. That lack of rigor
prompted at least one member nation of the Council of
Europe to refuse to sign the measure. At the time,
Germany already had a strict ban on human embryo research,
a direct response to the Nazi eugenics programs of World

(06:10):
War Two. The German government said the proposed measure was
weaker than its current standing laws, so there was no
point in signing it. The United Kingdom, on the other hand,
took the opposite approach. It argued that the band was
too restrictive and that human cloning should perhaps be allowed
in some cases, such as when a couple is completely sterile.

(06:33):
Of course, it's worth remembering that Dolly the Sheep was
a UK native herself, and it's possible that her country
just wanted to keep their options open since they were
already ahead of the cloning curve. Twenty five years on,
there's still no clear consensus on human cloning. In eighteen,
it was reported that only about seventy countries had banned

(06:55):
human cloning, and of that number, not all of the
bands are absolute. More than a dozen of those nations,
including the UK, Japan, and Israel, still allow for so
called therapeutic cloning. That's when human embryonic stem cells are
cloned for use in cell based therapies, though they're never
grown past fourteen days in either case. The majority of

(07:18):
countries have yet to pass any federal legislation relating to
human cloning. That includes the United States, where cloning policy
varies widely from one state to the next. That means
Richard Seed never did have to relocate to Tijuana, though
he never managed to clone anyone either, or at least

(07:39):
not as far as we know. I'm Gay Bluzier, and
hopefully you now know a little more about history today
than you did yesterday. If you have a second and
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(08:00):
my way at this Day at I heart media dot com.
Thanks as always the Chandler Mays for producing the show,
and thank you for listening. I'll see you back here
again tomorrow for another day in history class.