Germany should maintain its ban on reproductive cloning and the penalties for violating the law should be more clearly defined in the future, the country's National Ethics Council said on Monday.

The Council, appointed by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in 2001, also recommended that the country's prohibition of therapeutic cloning be maintained for the moment, but this was more of a political than an ethical recommendation.

Rumors about the Council's decision last month suggested it would give the green light to therapeutic cloning, however, after 15 months of consultation its members were unable to come to a unanimous decision on the subject.

Instead the 25 prominent jurists, scientists, theologians, ethicists, and political scientists mapped out three different positions along with their ethical arguments and implications.

One group wanted to aim for a worldwide ban on all forms of cloning, stating that an embryo, even if it does not have the potential for development, enjoys the full dignity of a human being. The second group considered cloning for research and therapeutic reasons to be justifiable if strictly regulated. The third group called the creation of human embryos with the cloning technique not ethically justifiable at present, but wanted to keep the option open should new scientific developments or techniques circumvent current ethical problems.

Before publishing its report, the council stressed that its main role is not to advise politicians on which course of action to take, but to provide a thorough basis for decision making.

"I worry about giving our judgement ex cathedra and trying to instruct politics or society," said Jens Reich, a member of the Ethics Council and professor of bioinformatics at the Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin.

The reactions of Germany's stem cell scientists ranged from acceptance to disappointment. Hans Schoeler, of the newly created Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Muenster, Germany, argued that, in Germany, there is currently no need for approval of cloning techniques.

"We have only five research teams working with human embryonic stem cell lines right now and basically three people who develop cloning techniques in animals and none of them wants to do cloning experiments on humans right now", he told The Scientist. Schoeler had differentiated mouse embryonic stem cells into egg cells at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia before returning to Germany.

Currently, German law only allows research with human embryonic stem cell lines that are imported from overseas and were created before January 1, 2002. Every research project is peer-reviewed by a national authority, the Robert Koch Institute, and has to be considered "high ranking" in order to get approval. This leaves German stem cell scientists wanting a generally more positive climate for their research.

"I was disappointed by the ethics Council's comment," said Jüergen Hescheler, professor of neurophysiology at the University of Cologne and head of one of the five teams that work with human embryonic stem cells. He has differentiated them into heart cells and, recently, showed that their reaction to hormones resembles that of the adult heart muscle.

Hescheler said that, under the current arrangements, he cannot plan for future experiments. "We don't know if we should invest our efforts and money into the development of therapies or rather into basic research."

But Hescheler pointed out that, what the country's researchers need before a licence to clone, is a greater investment in the field and a change of the stem cell law so that newer stem cell lines could be imported or even created in Germany.

The Council's report comes a few weeks ahead of a scheduled United Nations debate on a global convention on cloning. The United States heads a group of nations that want a global ban, while the United Kingdom and others agree with the science academies that are urging the United Nations to enact a global ban on reproductive cloning, but to allow reproductive cloning. The last round of that debate, in 2003, saw nations bitterly divided on the issue.