Stopping the delirium” “

“Human life degraded to a deposit of spare parts”: that’s the comment of Cardinal KARL LEHMANN , president of the German Bishops’ Conference, on the recent news from South Korea about the cloning of human embryos. “Not even a presumed medical utility, though even that is very far from having been demonstrated, may justify any procedure that implies the killing of human embryos”, declared Lehmann to the daily Allgemeine Zeitung Mainz on 14 February. “[Such research] gambles with human hopes and with promises of healing, that disguise the fact that the human person is reduced to a mere object from the very beginning of his life”, added the cardinal. Numerous other criticisms have been made of the experiment. The fact that it coincides with the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the death of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who had postulated: “Man must always be treated as an end and never as a means”, has not gone unnoticed and has been underlined by many. “RESEARCH MUST EXIST BUT NOT AT ANY PRICE!”: so declared Bishop Joachim Wanke of Erfurt on 13 February. “With the experiment in South Korea, man has become a mere means. The scientific terms and the tactical gambling with people’s hopes cannot disguise the fact that 30 embryos, in other words human lives, were killed for this experiment. The scientists have overstepped limits that they ought to have respected in any case”, declared Msgr. Wanke. The bishop also deplored the position taken by the federal government in Germany in November 2003 during UN negotiations for a total ban on cloning at the world level. On that occasion, the government had voted for a fresh round of negotiations, ignoring the position of the Bundestag, the German Federal Parliament, which favours a ban on cloning. “In view of this scientific ‘progress’, it’s now more difficult to find an agreement at the world level”, he observed. “Human embryos are not a biomaterial devoid of moral connotations, with which we can do just as we like”, affirmed Bishop Gebhard Fürst of Rottenburg-Stuttgart and Bishop Gerhard Maier, of Stuttgart, in a joint declaration released on the same day. The two bishops urge the German government to “finally respect the unequivocal will expressed by the Bundestag” and “energetically commit itself to a ban on cloning at the world level”. “A human embryo has been cloned for the first time. That represents not only the breaking of a taboo, but also an attack on human dignity”, declared Bishop Reinhard Marx of Trier on 18 February. “The step from so-called cloning for therapeutic ends to cloning for reproductive purposes can no longer be excluded”, observed Marx, who urged all scientists “to oppose a development diametrically opposed to the ethics of science”. evangelic church and medical association. Germany’s Evangelic Church (EKD) has also voiced strong criticism of the experiment. Its president Wolfgang Huber declared: “True progress does not consist in doing everything we are able to do. True progress is shown by choosing the forms of conduct to which we can respond. Cloning is not one of them”, declared Huber, who also said: “The Korean researchers have shown how it is possible to clone man. We have long known that there are those who want to do so: members of the Raelian sect in Canada, for example, or Professor Antinori in Italy. I have no certainty that the danger of possible malformations will discourage them”. Germany’s Medical Association has also deplored the South Korean experiment: “We must stop this delirium of omnipotence and introduce an international veto on cloning”, says a statement put out on 12 February. “We cannot permit human embryos to be raised as sources of raw material. If we place human life at the disposal of commercial use, no ethics in the world can save us”, warned the Medical Association’s president, Jörg-Dietrich Hoppe, who underlined the need to reach “binding agreements for the safeguard of the embryo. We cannot permit research to shirk yet again its obligations of an ethical nature”.