European MPs refuse to outlaw human cloning

A call for a ban on human cloning was rejected by the European Parliament last night, clearing the way for the European Union to put 200-300 million euros into stem-cell research over the next four years.

In a surprise decision, MEPs voted down their own report after a bitter political wrangle over the morality of cloning.

A European ban would have been symbolic rather than legal, as individual member states decide this area of policy, but could have been significant in future EU funding – something over which MEPs do have a big say.

The resounding vote of 316-37 vote against a ban will be a relief for scientists pursuing research into therapeutic cloning and disappoint a motley army of opponents of gene research. It comes days after a firm in the United States said it had cloned a human embryo, a move condemned by pro-life campaigners.

For the European Parliament the whole exercise has, however, proved a considerable embarrassment. A special parliamentary committee on human genetics was set up to report to the chamber and 11 months were spent consulting scientists on both sides of the argument, but right-wing MEPs, Christian Democrats and Greens combined forces to make sure the report produced recommendations unexpectedly hostile to cloning.

One MEP sympathetic to cloning confessed that more liberal MEPs had "failed to get our act together", and an official said that the end product was a "morality-driven agenda set by Christian Democrats, Forza Italia [the party of Italy's right-wing premier, Silvio Berlusconi] and friends of the [US] Republicans". The MEP who chaired the committee, Robert Goebbels, was forced to admit: "Practically everybody was unhappy about something.

Confusion was compounded by the fact that 150 fewer MEPs took part in the final vote than had participated in the first. Euro MPs left in droves yesterday to try and catch flights from Brussels airport which is still suffering the effects of the collapse of the Belgian national airline, Sabena.

The likely effect of the outcome of yesterday's vote is that MEPs may be encouraged to concentrate on subjects on which they have legislative power and avoid the big moral questions like abortion and cloning.

David Bowe, the Labour MEP on the committee, said: "This is a victory for common sense and one which proves that there is no ethical consensus in Europe, and these issues are best left to member states. The European Parliament is going to have to learn that it should be careful when it steps into this area." If adopted in its original form, the report could have interfered with the EU's plans to spend €2.15bn over the next four years on health-related genetic research. Of this, around €200-300m would go to research on aborted embryos and those left over from in-vitro fertilisation.

MEPs have voted once to back the research programme but a commitment to ban human cloning would have been a significant complication. The Parliament still has another vote on the issue in store.

During yesterday's debate in the parliament, the European Commissioner for Research, Philippe Busquin told MEPs: "We should not definitively exclude particular possibilities of research as we would thereby run the risk of depriving ourselves of ways of relieving great suffering and compromising Europe's chances of remaining at the forefront of knowledge."