Advocate Summary

Issue: Human Cloning  
Advocate:  The American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Peter Farnham 
Date of Interview: 6/5/02

Basic Background
We’re working on a cloning issue right now. Basically we’re supporting a bill that introduced in the Senate S2439 called the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2002, introduced by a large group of senators the principles are Orrin Hatch, Dianne Feinstein Kennedy and Specter. This bill has been introduced as a counter weight to a much more onerous bill, titled exactly the same by the way S1899. That was introduced by Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas. The Brownback bill would ban cloning of human beings for any purpose whatsoever. The other bill the one that we are supporting would ban what’s called reproductive cloning, that is cloning that is intended to produce a living human, but it would allow cloning to produce what are arguably embryos which could be used to extract stem cells, which could have tremendous potential for therapy for treating genetic illnesses. So those are the differences between the two bills. They both would ban cloning to reproduce humans, but the Brownback bill would ban cloning for the other purpose as well. So we have been supporting the Feinstein Kennedy bill since it was introduced and we have been opposing the Brownback bill pretty much from the get go. 

Prior Activity on the Issue 
None mentioned.

Advocacy Activities Undertaken
As far as tactics go, we are one of a number of scientific societies working on this issue, most of the major life sciences scientific societies are supporting the Feinstein/ Kennedy bill so we’re working with…we’ve formed a more or less (?) floating crap game in terms of a coalition. There is a formal coalition called the CAMR, Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, that requires a big buy-in, you know, you’ve got to kick in thousands of dollars, we’re not a member of that but we work closely with these people and so we’ve got this loose coalition of organizations that are working to defeat the Brownback bill, and support the Kennedy/ Feinstein bill. So coalition politics inside the beltway is a big thing.
-We also bring in outside advocates. We bring our members in and take them around to visit individual members. On May 15th my public affairs committee met here in Washington and we spent the whole day over in the Senate talking about several bills the cloning legislation is one of them and we visited ten senate offices and gave our recommendations about supporting the Kennedy/Feinstein bill. We knew going in that some of the people we were visiting, their bosses were sponsors of the Brownback bill, and we knew we weren’t going to get anywhere with them but you need to let them know that there are people in their state that don’t support that position on the subject and they need to hear from everybody so. Whether or not they are in favor or oppose a bill, it didn’t matter if they (the ASBMB members) had a member here that was from their state, we got them in to see their member. So constituency is another tactic.
Grassroots letter-writing campaign is another tactic – you get all your members, throughout the whole country, all US membership – we sent them a one page email alert asking them to contact their senator about, again with our message to support 2439 so that’s another tactic that we use.
Trading information and keeping a whip count, keeping track of who’s who and who’s taking what position. It’s getting down now actually to where it looks like there are only about eight or ten senators that haven’t committed.  So sharing information is very important. 
Op ed pieces, Editorials, you know, get people to write them, get them published, some of the people I work with have had some success in getting them published, not major papers, but major regional papers, good solid regional papers. We want to get prominent, well known star power type people to testify at congressional hearings. Nobel laureates and Christopher Reeve, he was a movie star that was terribly injured, he’s been a very powerful advocate, in supporting the Feinstein bill. And when I say us I don’t mean my personal society but the coalition that is working on this. But we meet with, we are in regular contact with the aids for the four senators. They tell us what’s going on once the debate begins on the Senate floor, we’ll be meeting with them pretty much daily, to keep track of what’s going on.  Another, one real powerful tactic, that one of my colleagues was able to do, was to get, to organize a letter of forty Nobel laureates signed, supporting the Hatch/Feinstein bill. So those are ah, pretty much the major tactics that we use. 

Future Advocacy Activities Planned
None mentioned.

Key Congressional Contact(s)/Champions
Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)
Edward Kennedy (D-MA)
Arlen Specter (R-PA)

Targets of Direct Lobbying
Those eight or so senators that are still undecided are key people. So it looks like we would prevail today on a straight up vote. But the key issue is that you need to get 60 to get any kind of bill to pass the Senate. 

Targets of Grassroots Lobbying
None mentioned.

Coalition Partners: Names/Participants
CAMR, Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, (members in folder). FASEB – The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology

Other Participants in the Issue Debate
A number of right to life groups are supporting the other side. I think it’s called the National Catholic Conference or the national Conference of Catholic Bishops the guy running that groups, their chief lobbyist, is a guy named Richard Dorflinger, and he’s been quoted as say he views this vote as the most important pro-life vote this year.  As far as a lot of the people supporting Brownback are concerned it is very much a right to life issue. And there are people who believe that Brownback’s real agenda here is to use it as a stopping force and next go after abortion. So that’s the feeling, that if he wins here, he could use that as a spring board to launch an assault on reproductive rights.  

And any of the conservative social groups, that deal with social issue. A lot of these other groups most any of the conservative organizations are supporting Brownback. And Bush, the president, is supporting Brownback too.  

So the American Society for reproductive medicine is a very strong advocate for stem cell research if you want to talk to somebody over there I’d recommend a guy named Sean Tipton, he’s their top lobbyist, and he’s very very intently involved in this issue he’s much more knowledgeable about it than I am and he would be someone you really should talk to if you want to get another look at this issue he’s part of CAMR. I head Sean on a local night time talk radio program debating a Brownback advocate. 

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence
We argue that the potential for developing cures and therapies for people that are walking around now, desperately in need of help out weights what the people on the other side are claiming that a couple of cells is a human life of an equivalent weight in value of a walking around human with enormous physical and mental problems which could be addressed if these therapies were developed if these stem cells could be used. It is very much a health and curative argument. 

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence
None mentioned.

Targeted Arguments, Targets, and Evidence
You want to go into a meeting with an individual, you want to have a good idea of what the state of play is in the first stage, where he or she comes from politically, and you can kind of tactically switch things around a little bit. But intellectually you really need to stick to your fundamentals, there are maybe things about the order you present stuff or the argument that you emphasize. But we pretty much have a message so we don’t really play fast and loose, or really change what we say from one person to another. 

Nature of the Opposition
A number of right to life groups are supporting the other side. I think it’s called the National Catholic Conference or the national Conference of Catholic Bishops the guy running that groups, their chief lobbyist, is a guy named Richard Dorflinger, and he’s been quoted as say he views this vote as the most important pro-life vote this year.  As far as a lot of the people supporting Brownback are concerned it is very much a right to life issue. And there are people who believe that Brownback’s real agenda here is to use it as a stopping force and next go after abortion. So that’s the feeling, that if he wins here, he could use that as a spring board to launch an assault on reproductive rights.  

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition 
That really appears to be the fundamental issue – is where you draw the line, you know, what constitutes human life. That’s really the heart of the issue. We very much agree with Senator Brownback that reproductive cloning is morally indefensible. Because you know, cloning an animal is a very difficult thing to do, there are a few animals that they have successfully cloned, but it’s like a few tries out of hundreds and with animals you have the option to euthanize if there was a horrible deformity, or they can’t breath or there is some terrible problem, but you can’t do that with a kid, you can’t do that with a baby. And it would be morally indefensible to try to clone a child. And I don’t know of one responsible scientist that would even try. Now there are these aliens, these people from outer-space you know they’re nuts, you know these people are an entirely different kind of fish, but nobody considers them serious, [so they aren’t really in the debate?] No, they’re really very marginalize because they are such lunatics, they issued a press release that they want to clone count Dracula, it’s absurd, and I don’t know what they think, or who they think they are dealing with, stupid stuff. So they are very marginalized. I have heard people make the argument, the only defensible argument you could make [for reproductive cloning] is if you have families, if you have people that are not fertile. And they want to have a child and they don’t want to adopt and they want to have a child of their own make up that’s about the only morally justifiable argument I’ve heard in favor of human cloning I’ve heard. So logically you run up against the problem that you’d be taking a huge risk in trying to clone a child because the odds are quite frankly that the child would be still born or that they would have birth defects of one degree or another that would be probably about a 99% chance of that. 

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition
None mentioned.

Targeted Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition (and Targets)
None mentioned.

Described as a Partisan Issue
Yes, conservatives are for stricter restrictions 

Venue(s) of Activity
Senate 

Action Pending or Taken by Relevant Decision Makers
There are a number of different cloning bills introduced, none have been brought to a vote. 

Policy Objective(s) and Support for/Opposition to the Status Quo
The ASBMB support S2439 which bans reproductive cloning but allows cloning for the purpose of stem cell research,  they oppose the more restrictive S1899 which bans all types of human cloning.

Advocate’s Experience: Tenure in Current Job/Previous Experience
I don’t have a science background, I’m an English major to tell you the truth and I got interested in government during Watergate actually you know that turned a lot of people off from government but it kind of turned me on. So when I was in college I took political science courses so when I graduated from college I went to work for another scientific society I worked there for about eight years, and then decided I wanted to leave, there were some internal things going on at the ACS that I didn’t want to hang out there any more. So I started looking around for a job and I came across 3 days after I started looking and they two weeks later I came here. So I’ve been here since 1985. And I really enjoy it. The people I deal with, our membership, they’re all smart and I’ll sit in a room with three Nobel laureates and I’m sort of dazzled, and I’m not even on the same planet, like always a half a step behind. So it’s very intellectually challenging and the issues matter, they really do, it’s not like you’re – you know name a business and there is a lobbyist for it like you know the Sleep Products Council they have the mattress makers and pillow manufacturers and I’m dealing with issues of life and death here. I’m not going to go start trying to convince America the value of sleep products. So I feel like I’m working in an area that really means something. Our members they seem to, I mean there is a healthy dose of self interest in some of this and I’m not denying there isn’t, but I think they genuinely feel that it’s intellectually challenging but they also feel that they’re doing something that is socially good, and research that could make people’s lives better. It’s socially a good thing. 

Reliance on Research: In-House/External (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
We don’t outsource much of anything. So I’m pretty much it, I’m my research team as well. I spend a lot of time on the internet and on the phone talking to people that’s how I do my research. And I attend meetings all the time. I was sort of stunned a month or two ago, I got a call down to the Hill “we are having this meeting of advocates of the Hatch/Kennedy bill and we’d like you to come down to the senate and meet with the staff” and I go down there and there are about 20 of us in the room and the four principle senators walked in and they spent an hour with us about 20 of us and I was absolutely amazed that, Ted Kennedy you know Hatch and Specter spent almost an hour with 20 of us I was stunned. I mean these guys can fill rooms and they’re sitting there talking to twenty of us asking us what we need to do, and I’d never been in a meeting like that in my life. I was just stunned. That’s the sort of meeting you never know when it’s going to happen but it’s very valuable to be at. There’s a lot of other meeting for coalitions, conference calls, or you go off and meet in somebody’s office, or go on a visit, or down to the cafeteria in the Russell Building and sit down and sort of compare notes. So, yeah there’s a lot of meetings, a lot of phone calls. 

Number of Individuals Involved in Advocacy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
One:   “-It’s just me”

Units in Organization Involved in Public Affairs/Policy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
We depend on our members, most of our members are all around the country, I depend pretty much on my senior leadership. A lot of them will come in to town, a lot of them are really committed to policy issues. Not an expensive undertaking, you know fly up for the day or overnight and so the airfares are fifteen hundred bucks. But they really do that on issues that that matter.
We have legal counsel, but they don’t lobby for us. The lobbying that we do is done by me and we are also part of a large federation called the FASEB – The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology and that is a formal incorporated coalition of 22 life sciences societies they’re head quarters are out in Bethesda and they have about a seven person government relations staff including a guy that works on the hill, they have a Hill office and he has an assistant and we work very closely with them, I don’t work for the Federation, I work for my own society but we are a member of the Federation. They’ve been very active on the cloning issue. 

Advocate’s Outstanding Skills/Assets (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
None mentioned.

Type of Membership: None, Institutions, Individuals, Both (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Individuals  

Membership Size (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Organizational Age (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Miscellaneous