Singapore bans cloning

SINGAPORE (Reuters) -- Singapore banned human cloning on Thursday and said offenders would face 10 years in jail to prevent "abhorrent experiments."

Singapore is a science hub with some of the world's most liberal rules on stem cell research and aims to boast 15 world-class biotechnology companies by 2010 after pouring at least $1.8 billion into life sciences.

"There is almost unanimous agreement from the international community, local scientific and religious groups as well as our general public that reproductive cloning of human beings is abhorrent," junior health minister Balaji Sadasivan told parliament while passing the law.

The government raised the jail term for human cloning from a proposed 5 years after public pressure.

The law, part of a series of regulations to govern a nascent biomedical research industry, specifically bans placing any human embryo clone in the body of a human or the body of an animal.

It also prohibits developing a human embryo outside the body of a woman for more than 14 days. Any person found guilty of cloning activity could also be fined up to S$100,000...