LONDON -- Medical scientists are treating parts of the body as a raw material to be "mined and harvested." Organs, tissues and cells were all too often seen as impersonal objects to be used for research and commercial exploitation. Writing in The Lancet, Professor Lori Andrews, from Chicago-Kent College of Law, and Professor Dorothy Nelkin, of New York University, said that attitude could be seen in the metaphors used by scientists: "Body parts are extracted like a mineral, harvested like a crop, or mined like a resource.

"Tissue can be 'procured'--a term that is more commonly used to refer to land, goods, or prostitutes. Cells, embryos or tissue can be frozen, banked, placed in libraries or repositories, marketed, patented, bought, or sold." One physician who patented a cell line referred to his Californian patient's body as a "gold mine."

The professors compared this practice to the body-snatching of the 18th century, whose practitioners murdered individuals to sell them to an anatomy school.

Women wanting breast implants after cancer surgery or to improve their looks may be able before long to have living tissue grown from their own cells implanted instead of silicone, Britain's Sunday Times newspaper reported.

American scientists have already succeeded in growing nipples and associated tissue using human cartilage cells, the newspaper said. Tissue engineers at the U.S. company Reprogenesis predict that in five years time they will be able to create whole breast transplants.

WASHINGTON  -- A Chicago-area scientist is poised to start experiments on cloning human beings to create babies for infertile couples. Richard Seed, a physicist who has done fertility research, has proposed setting up a clinic that would clone babies for would-be parents.

President Clinton urged Congress to pass a law banning human cloning for five years.

Seed, 69, said, "If not me, then someone else. If not now, then later. If not here, then elsewhere. A political group can only impede, it cannot stop."

Asked to answer critics who accuse him of staging publicity stunts and not heeding moral arguments against making genetic copies of people, Seed said: "They can stuff it up their nose."

Experiments in human cloning could begin in Britain as early as next year. Sir Colin Campbell, chairman of the Human Genetics Advisory Commission, said the technique could bring new diagnoses and treatments for a whole range of illnesses.

Britain has been at the forefront of the cloning debate after scientists in Scotland made worldwide headlines by cloning Dolly the sheep. Cloning of embryos is prohibited but the method used to create Dolly is not.

Using a cow's eggs as incubators, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison successfully cloned five different species, including primates, in an experiment that ethics experts expect will intensify an international furor over human cloning.

The new findings offer evidence that the unfertilized eggs of one species can be combined with adult cells taken from a wide variety of animals.

The experiment, which included sheep, pigs, rats, cattle and rhesus monkeys, takes the cloning of mammals into a new dimension by using the technology to combine different species.

The findings raise a host of questions about whether this technique could, or should, be applied to human beings. The research is so new that no one has any clear idea what utility there might be in using human cells to create transpecies clones, by transplanting a human nucleus into an animal egg or vice versa.

A few months ago, medical researcher Scott McIvor got an e-mail message from a doctor who wanted McIvor to help him change a patient's skin color.

McIvor oversees the University of Minnesota's program in gene therapy, in which researchers inject healthy new genes into patients in an attempt to treat genetic diseases. The doctor knew that genes affecting skin pigmentation had already been identified, and he had a patient who wanted to change his racial appearance. Would McIvor please treat his patient with those genes?

The genetic enhancement of healthy people raises a host of difficult ethical questions. Would cosmetic gene therapy exacerbate racial or other prejudices, for example, by creating a market in preferred physical traits? Might it lead to a society of DNA haves and have-nots, and the creation of a new underclass of people unable to keep up with the genetically fortified Joneses?

Public opinion polls suggest that the demand for genetic enhancements may be substantial. Surveys in 1986 and 1992 showed that 40 percent to 45 percent of the American public approved of the concept of using genes to bolster physical and intellectual traits.