Europe divided on bioethics convention:
This article was originally published in Clinica
Executive Summary
More than half of the 40 member states of the Council of Europe signed the European Bioethics Convention at a ceremony in Oviedo, Spain, last month. The convention, which effectively bans human cloning, says that interventions "seeking to modify the human genome may only be undertaken for preventive, diagnostic or therapeutic purposes and only if its aim is not to introduce any modifications in the genome of the descendants". Notable absentees among the signatories were Germany, Switzerland and the UK.