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The UN is calling for an urgent ban on human cloning.

The ban would prevent rogue scientists from cloning human babies. The report, entitled “Is Human Reproductive Cloning Inevitable: Future Options for UN Governance”, suggests it is only a matter of time until a human will be cloned.

50 countries have outlawed human cloning, but 140 countries don’t. Some countries are known for lax laws on human cloning. Thailand in particular is thought to have some scientists working on human cloning, including disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-Suk.

Chamundeeswari Kuppuswamy, co-author of the study, said: “China has guidelines on human reproductive cloning but no law as such, while there are many African countries that don’t have any legislation in place.

“It is not terribly expensive to set up the experiments, process the eggs and get the raw materials needed to perform cloning and as research in the area continues, someone is going to manage it.

“The state of the science at the present time, however, means that there are going to be a lot of failures and deformities in any clones produced, which is one of the major concerns if it goes on unregulated.”

The report calls for reproductive cloning to be outlawed, but for therapeutic cloning to be legal.

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