As a kid, if someone told me that the potential for humans cloning would be an issue, I would have laughed at them. The reality these days it is a very real issue and it needs to be addressed now. As our technology continues to progress, I can all but guarantee that will see human cloning in our lifetimes. Law or no law.

A UN general assembly committee has backed a proposal to ban all forms of human cloning. The “nonbinding statement” - proposed by Honduras, backed by the US and carried by 71 votes to 35 with 43 abstentions - will now go before the full UN assembly, Reuters reports. The decision comes at the end of four years’ heated debate into the matter.

The issue of human cloning, or cloning of human embryos to obtain stem cells, is deeply divisive. Various countries have already gone on record as to how they will vote when the committee’s statement comes before the UN. The three main viewpoints can be summarised with the following examples:

* Honduras, the US and Costa Rica are opposed to this research on any grounds because they view it as the taking of a human life.
* Opponents of the proposal - including Belgium, Britain and Singapore - say the statement “would have no impact on their practice of co-called therapeutic stem cell research”, although British delegate Gavin Watson said he voted against the statement which “could be interpreted as a call for a total ban on all forms of human cloning”.
* Islamic nations have said they will abstain in the absence of a consensus.

President Bush’s opposition to human cloning and stem cell research is no secret. In 2001 he issued an executive order “restricting federal funding for stem cell research to only those batches of the cells that existed at the time”, provoking various members of Congress to last week introduce bills aimed at side-stepping the ban.

In Britain, meanwhile, scientists recently called for £100m to establish a stem cell research foundation. This came hot on the heels of the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority decision to grant Professor Ian Wilmut (the “creator” of Dolly the sheep) a license to create stem cells from cloned embryos to facilitate a study into Motor Neuron Disease.