The Lower House plenary session began deliberations Tuesday on two separate bills, one each from the government and the Democratic Party of Japan, to ban human cloning and punish offenders with a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.
If either is made law, it would be the nation's first legislation to regulate a specific area of scientific research.
The government in its proposal has toughened the maximum penalty for attempting to produce a human clone to 10 years in prison or a 10 million yen fine, up from five years in prison or a 5 million yen fine. The earlier version of the bill was scrapped in the previous ordinary Diet session.
The bill also prohibits impregnating organisms with hybrid embryos, where animal germ cells are used to fertilize human germ cells, or chimera embryos, where human and animal embryonic cells are combined.
While the government-proposed bill only bans human cloning, the DPJ bill aims to regulate all technologies involving the manipulation of embryos.