President Clinton has temporarily banned federally funded cloning research until he hears policy recommendations from the national bioethics advisory board. Bills to control cloning are pending in Congress, as well as in state legislatures in California and New York.

The European Commission and UNESCO also are convening their own bioethics commissions for advice. Britain, Spain, Denmark, Germany and Australia have laws barring human cloning; legislation is pending in Canada.

Indeed, biologists have been scrupulous in ensuring open public debate over controversial experiments, said science policy expert Sheldon Krimsky at Tufts University. He was among the first members of a federal panel formed in the 1970s that until recently regulated recombinant DNA experiments.