How to revise the guidelines

The most striking feature of the Japanese regulation is that it is governed by a two-layered system, consisting of the law and the guidelines. One of the implications is that the guidelines can be “swiftly” altered when the circumstances surrounding human cloning technologies greatly change. For example, if a company in a foreign country begins to make tremendous profits from data acquired from research using human somatic clone embryos in a laboratory, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology may revise the guidelines and lift the ban on research on human somatic clone embryos without a long drawn-out debate in the Diet. The extraction of ES cells from a human somatic clone embryo is currently prohibited, but if many countries begin to do research on therapeutic cloning of this kind, the Ministry may revise the guidelines “swiftly” and allow researchers to study ES cells acquired from a human somatic clone embryo. It is also possible for the Ministry to lift the ban on the transfer of a human-human chimeric embryo into a uterus, leading to the creation of a human individual made of two (or more than two) different human embryos.

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The Ethics of Human Cloning and the Sprout of Human Life (2004)
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