A group of Chinese and French experts attending a symposium on human cloning yesterday called on the international community to promulgate an international convention to ban human cloning as soon as possible.

"The situation of the human being is critical, as human cloning is doomed to happen due to the development of science and technology," said Professor Xu Zongliang, an expert from China's national team on the study of human genome, at the symposium "Human Cloning: Law and Society."

Without powerful international restriction, it is too difficult to prevent some business people or scientists from carrying out human cloning, the Chinese expert noted.

Religious and political leaders worldwide, from US President George W. Bush to the Vatican, have condemned the practice since a US company claimed it had cloned a human embryo for the first time.

The announcement on Sunday by Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) of Worcester, Massachusetts, raised a multitude of questions over cloning, with Bush calling it "morally wrong" and others saying the company had crossed a moral and ethical line.

"The use of embryos to clone is wrong," Bush said. "We should not as a society grow life to destroy it. And that's exactly what's taking place. And I have made that position very clear," he said.

In an equally blunt statement, the Vatican charged that the American company had tampered with human life.

The European Commission said it would not finance any similar projects.

In Germany, the president of the Association of German Doctors, Joerg-Dietrich Hoppe, said the new cloning experiments were "unethical and testify to a horrifyingly low estimation of human life."

The United Nations is set to begin negotiations next year on a draft treaty banning the cloning of humans, an initiative of France and Germany launched in June.

While the news raised many ethical dilemmas for religious and political leaders, some scientists pointed to the value of the research and said it was just another step towards using stem cell technology to treat a range of diseases.

Australian stem cell researcher Alan Trounson said the latest move created no new ethical or moral dilemmas for him. "I don't adhere to the slippery slope principle, otherwise I don't think we would have any cures in medicine," he said.

In Britain, scientists who created Dolly the sheep played down the US company's achievement, calling it preliminary research.

(Xinhua News Agency November 28, 2001)