In 1993 I conducted a poll called the International Bioethic Survey, which asked ordinary people about ethical dilemmas, and one of the questions was whether they would be for or against genetic enhancement in their children. An interesting finding was that in Thailand and China there is a lot of support for eugenic engineering. In western countries there seems to be a tolerant attitude towards modifying genes for medical reasons and yet a deep suspicion of doing it for enhancement purposes, but in Asia there isn’t that distinction. The philosophies of Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism don’t seem to lay down laws against trying to make ourselves better than we are.

One of the things that drove me and my co-authors to write our report on human cloning recently was the way the issue was being treated in the UN. In 2005 there was supposed to be a convention to ban reproductive cloning; it had unanimous support, but when some countries tried to ban embryo research as well we ended up with a split decision and a weak declaration. It was a missed chance and one of our main points in the report was that the UN has to do a better job at governing cloning.

The danger is that we’ll come to accept the idea of consumer children, or think that we can select our children from a supermarket catalogue – or we might clone in order to replace someone we've lost. That attitude is wrong because clones are inevitably different to the human being they came from. Even if there are a hundred clones from one person, every one of them is going to be an individual and has to be treated as such. The same is true even for a cyborg or any sort of future artificial intelligence creation. It may sound crazy, but they’re all beings.