France looks liberal on cloning; less so on patents

Under the proposal, reproductive cloning, creation of embryos by nuclear transfer and autologous cloning would be banned. Reproductive cloning would be criminalized, with fines of up to E45,000 ($48,443) and three years of imprisonment. It would apply to French citizens who go outside of the country to do reproductive cloning, and also explicitly applies to sects, such as the Raelians, that claim immunity to laws on reproductive cloning on religious grounds.

While the proposed law would be more research friendly as far as therapeutic cloning, it also could make it more difficult to patent DNA sequences in France. As written, the proposal says, "An element isolated from the human body or otherwise produced by a technical procedure, including the sequence or the partial sequence of a gene, can not constitute a patentable invention."...