Advocate Summary

Issue:  Human Cloning
Advocate:  American Society for Reproductive Medicine – Sean Tipton 
Date of Interview: 6/20/02

Basic Background
The Congressional action started with Dolly and there were House and Senate hearings in the spring of 1997, I remember Ian Wilmut coming and testifying in the Senate. And then there weren’t hearings until the December of 1998 Richard Seed, he’s a retired physicist, he announced he was going to do cloning. Everybody ignored it at the time and then in January of 1998, NPR did a story as if they were uncovering this thing that Richard Seed was going to do,  and there was an exclusive and all this kind of stuff and all hell broke loose from an NPR standpoint. And then the Senate decided they were going to pass something right away, actually I take that back I guess in the summer of 1997 there were some committee hearings and some bills were introduced and they got to markup in the science committee but it never cleared the committee in the House. And then in January 1998 Senator Lott ended up bring a bill Kit Bond from Missouri was the sponsor at the time, and they wound up bringing it straight to the floor.  And we beat them rather soundly. And we got some votes because of procedural objections you know, people said “you don’t bring stuff like this to the floor” without having committee hearings and venting the legislation. So we got people like Strom Thurmond and Conney Mac and Senator Hatch even then let us know that if we really needed him, he would be with us, he said you know  I’m not going to vote with you because I don’t think you need me but if you did I would vote with you. And I remember working with Senator Bond on that, and we were in a meeting with his office and we were trying to explain it to them, and they were really trying to learn a lot, and we got interrupted, the Senator we were working with got up and left the room, and then he came back and said we’re done, my assumption was that he got an instruction from the right-to-life people and they were not going to bother to learn the science, they were going to do something else. But it was like literally somebody flipped the switch he went out, took a phone call, came back in and said we’re done you may go now. That was really the last conversation we had with them.   

The amendments that Brownback has been trying to attach to things have been quite easy to deal with because no one wants to mess around with them. We’ve clearly picked up some votes that might have gone differently on a straight up down vote, people just don’t want, in this case, the terrorism bill messed with. There are a lot of people that object on procedural grounds. Somebody was just telling me this morning that was meeting with Senator Lott today and he said, you know if he keeps at this we’ll expel him or something, so he didn’t win any friends in the Republican Caucus with that tactic. So that was actually pretty easy. We were concerned about a moratorium that was a little bit of a concern, but he didn’t wind up doing it as a moratorium. A moratorium is a little bit dangerous for us because it sounds like a compromise. So I’m not sure what he was thinking tactically. 

It was interesting in like January, what happened was last November/ December, they were trying to get out of here, Brownback was trying to put his anti-cloning memo on anything that moved, all the appropriations bills. To get him to stop that Daschle promised him a vote, Brownback was trying to throw it on everything and they got tired of dealing with it. So everyone knew cloning was coming, and Daschle was saying we’re going to do this early, we’re going to do it in February or March so everyone knew it was coming. We brought the members of the ASRM executive committee into town for a meeting, we had them come in a day early and do a day of Senate visits. And in my 10 or 12 years of doing this I have never seen congressional staff pay as close attention to scientists and physicians as they did in the early part of this year. Everyone knew this vote was coming, everybody knew that it was extremely hard, that the science was complicated, that they had a lot to learn and they were eager to do so. Even people who we were pretty sure were going to be against us really wanted to substantively come to understand it. You know there were a couple of people like, don’t waste my time, it doesn’t matter what the substance is.  But most of it went so well, we had a number of our people come back during that time. And the way this works is that there is sort of a time limit for us, we have to get in early before positions solidify, we don’t give money so all we have to offer is our information, and that’s more important early on rather than later. And in this we were particularly well suited because we understood it better than almost anybody and they really needed the information.  

Fundamentally this became an abortion issue, became is not the right word, it always was an abortion issue people will try to couch it as not, we would try to couch it as not because we thought we’d get more votes that way but that’s what it is and all of these vote counts would break down like any other abortion issue. So you can pretty it up in a lot of ways but that’s still what it’s about. 

Prior Activity on the Issue 
None mentioned.

Advocacy Activities Undertaken
We are one of the founding members and I am one of the founding board members for the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research and we’ve been doing most of the work through CAMR, through the coalition. And it has been a very extensive effort, we’ve done everything from bringing physicians in to running advertisements, we’ve done sort of the grasstops kind of thing, having an 800 number patch-through, with the exception of giving a lot of money we’ve done pretty much everything, supported every kind of tactic that I know about. 

Literally we’ve done everything, we’ve been at this for five years.  I don’t think there is anything you could ask us and we would say no. We’ve had a very aggressive media strategy both as part of the coalition and as individual organizations. I could give you about three or four names to do a Google search on and you’d see there are about three or four of us that have become spokespeople for it. Like me becoming the spokesperson on behalf of ASRM or for the coalition and so just speaking personally I’ve done talk radio all over the country, I’ve done CNN a couple of times and we have a very strong relationship with a half dozen or so sort of leading national reporters that are covering the issue. 

What is now S2439, really started during the House debate last summer we realized we were going to lose and so the folks from bio and I went over and started talking with Feinstein and Kennedy’s people. Even before the house vote was done. And we’ve literally spent untold hours 
in one little conference room in Kennedy’s office hashing through some of this stuff, again and again and again. Most recently we did about six hours three weeks ago. 

One of the games we played in drafting legislation was to try to do something that would make it hard to conference and steer it toward a particular committee or not, so we certainly engaged in those sorts of tactics too.

We did request our members to write, what we have to go for is quality because we’re never going to match what the right-to-lifers have in quantity, Senator Hatch specifically requested like 4000 letters from scientists at one point, and I think we got them for him. And you know we did an op ed campaign, and we did paid advertising, we did a lot of talk show appearances everybody from me to Christopher Reeve, and anybody in between , anybody that could get anybody on. And again the best people to do it are patients, or a really, really good scientist if you have somebody that is both a Nobel prize winner and can handle the media then that’s very effective. 

Our ads were different from the Harry and Louis ads, but those were really effective, and we knew they were coming for a long time, and they were very well done and they got all kinds of free medial play which is what you’re trying to do.  
 
Future Advocacy Activities Planned
None mentioned.

Key Congressional Contact(s)/Champions
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)
Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA)

It was always apparent where the lead was going to come from, and it was always apparent that Hatch was very important and we did a lot of work on Hatch, we brought in every Utah connection we could find. And his staff was quite candid about what it would take. I think Senator Hatch knew all along what he was going to do he was just making sure he had the appropriate cover and he’s smart enough to know he had to time his announcement to maximize the impact of it, so it think he was doing that as well, so I think he always knew where he was going to come down he just didn’t want to say. It kind of shifts, originally Senator Specter and Harkin were leading the way it changed a little with the party change, because then the other, more appropriate committees were able to lead the way. And now because Senator Harkin is in a tough re-election he’ll really be low profile on this.

Targets of Direct Lobbying
None mentioned.

Targets of Grassroots Lobbying
None mentioned.

Coalition Partners: Names/Participants
The Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research (CAMR)
Biotech Industry Organization
Diabetes people have been real important, the Diabetes Research Foundation has been tremendously important, and almost all of the neurological groups, the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, the Alzheimer people, the Parkinson people, the Huntingston people have probably been the most visible 

Other Participants in the Issue Debate
The higher you go in the administration I think the minds are pretty well made up. Secretary Thompson I think was very important in the president’s stem cell decision. The thing with the administration is that they’ve done some high profile things but they haven’t been retailing it. So in April when the president invited all the right-to-life folks to the White House and made a big deal about his opposition to cloning. But what we’re hearing from the Hill is that the White House lobbyists on the Hill aren’t talking about it, they’re not making a big deal out of it. So it’s call that we need to energize the right wing and the born-agains for election purposes but I think they have bigger fish to fry substantively. 

The abortion groups have been pretty quite, they are paying close attention and we have been keeping them well informed of what’s going on. The strategy has been to sort of shore up, with any other women’s groups or on the left, particularly this issue that came up of the exploitation of women as egg donors. So we could kind of deal with that but do it kind of quietly because they aren’t going to bring any votes with them that aren’t already there but they were able to do some shoring up and you know let their friends know where they were.  

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence
I always argued you couldn’t remove stem cells from cloning. Now last summer while we were waiting for the president to do something on stem cells and trying to look at maybe needing Congress to override and the House bill started moving because of some media attention and we were not able to convince people of the strong relationship between the two issues we clearly have majorities in both chambers on stem cells but a lot of the patient advocates were not ready to go there yet on therapeutic cloning, the just were taking enough heat for their stem cell stances and some of the Republican members were letting them know that it would hurt their appropriations efforts and so they just didn’t want to take on that fight and that’s why we got beat in the House. That and the fact that a number of people that were being supportive of stem cells felt that they needed the political temper of voting to prohibit cloning. So really last summer the cloning fight was us an bio and most of the other groups taking the pass. 

We’ve always said that we don’t want to clone people but there is a lot more that you can do with this research, and that was before we knew – we were taking that stand a year before Jamie Thompson announced his ability to derive embryonic stem cell lines. So for our group we’re used to dealing with controversial reproductive topics, we’re used to dealing with embryos, we think you ought to be able to do research with embryos. So it’s not a stretch for us. So we feel very comfortable with it, I know where my board is, so we don’t need to revisit these issues every time a different aspect of the technology comes to the fore – and that’s all we see cloning as. It’s just a different manifestation, it’s just a new technology like any other technology. 

We’ve been trying always, just weren’t successful in trying to get them to take on therapeutic cloning. After the president’s stem cell decision and after the anti-cloning stuff started picking up steam, and after being successful with stem cells, people realized they could take up controversial subjects and deal with whatever negative fallout there might be, so I think that emboldened people. In November and December the CAMR board opted to take on therapeutic cloning as well. 

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence
What made the coalition work well was that we had patients to offer the emotional piece and the compassion piece, and we had scientists to talk about the importance of fundamental discovery and the scientific piece, we had a strong enough industry presence to make an economic argument and a number of universities and university associations to make a geographic argument for its importance. So we covered a lot of bases that way. I can tell you that we don’t get anywhere without patients, patients are the most important piece for us.

Targeted Arguments, Targets, and Evidence
You vary the emphasis a little bit but I don’t think you fundamentally change the message. This is not something like, you know a defense contract thing where you can say this is a weapons system but it employs people in your district, you can’t play that. I mean you could try to but that would be Massachusetts and California and we don’t need any help with those states. 

Nature of the Opposition
It was all the right-to-life people, it was the Catholic Bishops, it was the National Right to Life Association, the American Life League, and you sort of have the emergence of a European-style left wing, anti-technology crowd that started to emerge – Society for Responsible Genetics or something like that, and there is a guy named Andrew Kimbrell – I guess he’s testifying tomorrow at the bioethics council, but he runs this international technology assessment group. Very loosely organized but it is very reminiscent of some of the Green organizations in Western Europe, anti-genetically modified food, it’s the same crowd that eventually becomes the WTO protestors but it’s starting to become more of a presence in the US than it has been. 

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition 
I can understand the right-to-life folks they are predictable, they are consistent, there’s no surprise there. 

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition
The other component that was sort of interesting was the right wing intellectual crowd, Leon Kass, Bill Kristol and all of those folks. And I still don’t quite understand, I mean their arguments are written better, but it still comes down to “ewe it’s yucky.” And I’m not sure what they are trying to do, there’s some speculation that Kristol has been trying to get back in the good graces of the Bushys after his support for McCain. But I find their position interesting because I just don’t understand it very well.    

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

Described as a Partisan Issue
Yes

Venue(s) of Activity
Senate HELP committee
Senate Judiciary committee

Action Pending or Taken by Relevant Decision Makers

Policy Objective(s) and Support for/Opposition to the Status Quo
Working to block Brownback’s more restrictive legislation banning all cloning and supporting the passage of the Kennedy/Feinstein bill which allows therapeutic cloning.

Advocate’s Experience: Tenure in Current Job/Previous Experience
I’ve been here for five years, I worked for a similar health group for three or four years before that and had been working for an university association prior to that.  

Reliance on Research: In-House/External (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
We do it all in-house, I’m incapable of righting anything longer than a page. At this point, there isn’t a lot of research, I guess this is all to knew to have a lot of data, and it’s speculative, you don’t know what this stuff is going to lead to, so there’s no need for extensive research. And the publications that come out we’re quite familiar with. So people ask what’s happening with this now, and I’m like well nothing, it’s brand new, nobody knows how to do it yet, so it’s not like you have to compile a lot of data. 

Number of Individuals Involved in Advocacy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Three

Units in Organization Involved in Public Affairs/Policy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
There are three of us here that do all government and media relations work. 

Advocate’s Outstanding Skills/Assets (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

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