VATICAN CITY - The Vatican condemned the first reported cloning of a human embryo, saying yesterday that promises of "sensational" cures from diseases can't justify the step by scientists in the United States.
Reacting to the news that the scientists had cloned a six-cell embryo, the Vatican said that the event "moves us to restate with force that the beginning of human life cannot be fixed by convention at a certain stage of embryonic development; it takes place, in reality, already at the first instant of the embryo itself."
"Thus, despite the declared `humanistic' intentions by those who predict sensational cures via this path ... what is needed is a calm but firm judgment which shows the moral gravity of this plan and which motivates an unequivocal condemnation," said the Vatican statement.
Vatican teaching holds that life begins at conception.
Earlier in the day, a top Vatican official, Monsignor Tarcisio Bertone, told Italian state television: "Therapeutic aims are excellent; they are praiseworthy. However, it is the means used that raise the questions."
If it involves "production and destruction of human beings to treat other human beings," said Bertone, "the end doesn't justify the means."
The Catholic church, Bertone said, was "launching an alarm" on cloning.
The scientists involved in the cloning have said they have no desire to create babies but only to create embryos as a way to obtain stem cells to fight disease.
The Vatican statement said the human embryo cloning made ever more urgent the bioethical question of just when human life begins.
The cloned embryo was formed by introducing genetic material into an egg cell without the use of a sperm cell. The Vatican said that life formed in this "inhuman" way nonetheless has "its dignity like that of every human life which is given existence."
The Vatican once again voiced support for other ways of obtaining stem cells, which are believed to hold promise for generating specific tissue type that might be useful in battling such diseases as Alzheimer's.
It said research has shown that "other roads can be taken, which are morally right and valid from the scientific point of view." It noted stem cells can be obtained from adult tissue, maternal blood and from fetuses that have been miscarried.
"This is the path that every honest scientist must follow in order to preserve the maximum respect for man, that is to say, for himself," the Vatican said.
Pope John Paul II made no public comments on the news Monday but has frequently added his moral weight to debates on bioethical questions and, in the past, has condemned human cloning projects. He has said that medical ethics are increasingly clashing with Catholic morality.
Reacting to the news Monday, Italy's health minister, Girolamo Sirchia, who is a physician, condemned any eventual cloning of an individual as a "crime against humanity."
In Brussels, Belgium, a senior European Union official called for an urgent debate on the ethics of cloning research.
"Not everything that is scientifically possible and technologically feasible is necessarily desirable or admissible," said EU Research Commissioner Philippe Busquin.
German Research Minister Edelgard Bulmahn said the claim showed the need for a worldwide ban on human cloning.
Joerg-Dietrich Hoppe, president of the main German doctors' association, described the U.S. research as a "nightmare that has now, unfortunately, become reality."
