SECTION: CAPITOL HILL HEARING TESTIMONY

LENGTH: 2484 words

COMMITTEE: HOUSE ENERGY AND COMMERCE

SUBCOMMITTEE: HEALTH

HEADLINE: PROHIBITON ON HUMAN CLONING

TESTIMONY-BY: LEON CASS, PROFESSOR

AFFILIATION: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

BODY:
June 20, 2001

Prepared Witness Testimony The Committee on Energy and Commerce W.J. "Billy Tauzin" Chairman

H.R. 1644, Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001, and H.R.____, Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001

Subcommittee on Health June 20, 2001

Mr. Leon Kass M.D., Ph.D. Addie Clark Harding Professor of Social The University of Chicago

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to testify before the subcommittee. I am Leon R. Kass, Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College, The University of Chicago. I have been professionally concerned, for over 30 years, with the ethical implications of biomedical advance. Originally trained in both medicine and biochemistry, I remain enthusiastic about biomedical research and its promise to cure disease and relieve suffering. Yet, as has been obvious for some time, new biotechnologies are also providing powers to intervene in human bodies and minds in ways that go beyond the traditional goals of healing the sick, to threaten fundamental changes in human nature and the meaning of our humanity. These technologies have now brought us to a crucial fork in the road, where we are compelled to decide whether we wish to travel down the path that leads to the Brave New World. That, and nothing less, is what is at stake in your current deliberations about whether we should tolerate the practice of human cloning. I am here to testify in favor of a national ban on human cloning and, in particular, in favor of HR 1644, "The Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001,"for two reasons. First, I believe that human cloning is unethical, both in itself and in what it surely leads to. Second, I believe that this bill offers us the bestindeed, the only reasonable chance at preventing human reproductive cloning from happening. (The full version of my argument is contained in a recent essay, "Preventing a Brave New World: Why We Should Ban Human Cloning Now," written precisely to gain support for such a bill and published in the May 21, 2001 issue of The New Republic. I submit it as an appendix to this statement.)

The vast majority of Americans object to human cloning, and on multiple moral grounds, among them the following. It constitutes unethical experimentation on the child-to-be, subjecting him or her to enormous risks of bodily and developmental abnormalities. It threatens individuality, by deliberately saddling the clone with a genotype that has already lived and to whose previous life its life will always be compared. It confuses identity by denying the clone two biological parents and by making it the twin of its older copy. It represents a giant step toward turning procreation into manufacture (especially when understood as the harbinger of non-therapeutic genetic manipulations to come). And it is a radical form of parental despotism and child abuseeven when practiced freely and on a small scale. Permitting human cloning means saying yes to the dangerous principle that we are entitled to determine and design the genetic make-up of our children. If we do not wish to travel down this eugenic road, an effective ban on cloning human beings is needed, and needed now before we are overtaken by events.

A majority of members of Congress, I believe, are, like most Americans, opposed to human cloning. But opposition is not enough. For if Congress does nothing about it, we shall have human cloning, and we shall have it soon. Congress' failure to try to stop human cloningand by the most effective meanswill in fact constitute its tacit approval.

What, then, is the most effective way to stop reproductive human cloning? Two legislative approaches competed with each other the last time Congress took up this issue. One bill would have banned only so-called reproductive cloning by prohibiting the transfer of a cloned embryo to a woman to initiate a pregnancy. The other bill would have banned all cloning by prohibiting the creation even of the embryonic human clones. Both sides opposed reproductive cloning, but because of the divide over the question of embryo research we got no ban at all. It would be tragic if we again failed to produce an effective ban on cloning human beings, especially now that certain people are going ahead with it and defying us to try to stop them.

A few years ago, I was looking for a middle way between the two alternatives that failed last time, but I am now convinced that an effective ban on reproductive cloning requires a ban on all human cloning, including the creation of the embryonic clones. Anyone truly serious about preventing human reproductive cloning must seek to stop the process from the beginning, at the stage where the human somatic cell nucleus is introduced into the egg. Here is why.

Once cloned human embryos are produced and available in laboratories and assisted-reproductive centers, it will be virtually impossible to control what is done with them. Biotechnical procedures and experiments take place in laboratories, hidden from public view, and for good commercial reasons these doings are concealed from the competition and everyone else. Huge stockpiles of cloned human embryos could thus be produced and bought and sold in the private sector without anyone knowing it. As we have seen with in vitro embryos created to treat infertility, embryos produced for one reason can be used for another reason: today "spare embryos" once created to begin a pregnancy are now usedby someone elsein research, and tomorrow clones created for research will be usedby someone elseto begin a pregnancy. Efforts at clonal baby-making (like other forms of assisted-reproduction) would take place out of sight, within the privacy of a doctor-patient relationship, making outside scrutiny extremely difficult. Moreover, the transfer of embryos to begin a pregnancy is a simple procedure (especially compared with manufacturing the embryo in the first place), simple enough that its final steps could be self-administered by the woman, who would thus absolve the doctor of blame for having "caused" the illegal transfer.

Worst of all, a ban on only reproductive cloning will turn out to be unenforceable. Should the illegal practice be detected, governmental attempts to enforce the reproductive ban would run into a swarm of practical and legal challenges, both to efforts aimed at preventing embryo transfer to the woman andeven worseto efforts seeking to prevent birth after the transfer has occurred. Should an "illicit clonal pregnancy" be discovered, no government agency is going to compel a woman to abort the clone, and there would be an understandable swarm of protest should she be fined or jailed before or after she gives birth.

For all these reasons, the only practically effective and legally sound approach is to block human cloning at the start, at the production of the embryonic clone. Such a ban is rightly characterized not as interference with reproductive freedom, nor even as unprecedented or dangerous interference with scientific inquiry, but as an attempt to prevent the unhealthy, unsavory, and unwelcome manufacture of and traffic in human clones. It would do what the American people want done: stop human cloning before it starts.

H.R. 1644, introduced by Dr. Weldon and joined now by more than 100 cosponsors, is just what the doctor ordered, precisely suited to accomplish this goal, no more and no less. It explicitly and precisely describes the specific deed that is outlawed (human somatic cell nuclear transfer to an egg), and it does not entangle us in difficult determinations of the perpetrator's intent or knowledge. Its substantial criminal and monetary penalties will almost certainly shift the incentives for renegades who are tempted to proceed. Extremely carefully drafted and limited in its scope, the bill makes very clear that there is to be no interference with the scientifically and medically useful practices of animal cloning or the equally valuable cloning of human DNA fragments, the duplication of somatic cells, or stem cells in tissue culture. Moreover, if enacted this bill would bring the United States into line with the already and soon- to-be-enacted practices of other nations, and, in collaboration with these efforts, offers us the best and, I think, the only realistic chance we have of keeping human cloning from happening, or happening much.

People who prefer the other approach to stopping human cloning, namely, a ban only on transfer of an embryonic clone to initiate a pregnancy, will oppose H.R. 1644 and will probably look with favor on the other bill before this Committee, H.R. 2172, introduced last week by Reps. Greenwood and Deutsch. But, in my opinion, a careful consideration of the specifics of this bill (as now written) shows that it does not effectively provide the ban on reproductive cloning that everyone wants. Indeed, it does not explicitly ban reproductive cloning at all. This bill permits the use of human somatic cell nuclear transfer technology (HSCNTT [1]), the act that creates an embryonic human clone. It prohibits (only) two things. First, it prohibits this act by people whose intent is to begin a pregnancy. Second, it prohibits people from shipping or transporting "the cellular product resulting from HSCNTT," but only if they know that "the product is intended to be used to initiate a pregnancy." These two prohibitions, even taken together, fail to outlaw a pregnancy- initiating transfer of a cloned embryo to a womanby someone other than its manufacturer. (Indeed, nowhere does the bill specifically ban the act of reproductive transfer to a woman by anyone.[2]) As a result, this bill fails to outlaw efforts to create a live-born human cloned individual.

The Greenwood-Deutsch bill places virtually no restrictions on the use of licitly produced "cellular products" of the technology (i.e., the embryonic clones), once they are created. Strikingly, there is no prohibition on receiving the "cellular product" of HSCNTT (i.e., the embryos) with an intent to initiate a pregnancy; indeed, there is no restriction whatsoever on what the purchaser of such embryos may do with them. Consider this possible scenario: I create embryo clones by HSCNTT. You buy them from me, telling me that you want them for research, and I ship them to you, taking you at your word. You change your mind (say, because your company's new management sees the prospect of gain from reproductive cloning), and you then use the purchased embryo (that you did not yourself create) to initiate a pregnancy. Under the terms of this bill, I have done nothing illegal and neither have you, and in the meantime, the cloned child is born.

There are two further difficulties with this bill. The two banned acts turn entirely either on intent or on foreknowledge of someone else's intenthard matters to discern and verify. Also, because the cloned embryo is treated like an ordinary drug whose registration with the FDA is (for obvious reasons) kept confidential, the public will be completely in the dark even about who is producing the embryo clones, much less where they are being bought and sold and who is doing what with them. With all due respect, as I read the present text of this bill, it seems to me to be less the "Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001" and more the "Human Embryo Cloning Registration and Industry Protection Act of 2001." It is not the reproductive cloning ban the American people are looking for.

I understand fully that some scientists and biotechnologists hope that the practice of embryo cloning would someday yield autologous tissues (and even organs) for transplantation, derivable for each person from his own embryonic twin clone, tissues useful for the treatment of serious chronic disease (so- called therapeutic cloning). Perhaps they are right. But we now have promising alternate routes to the same therapeutic possibilitiesnot only non-embryonic (so called adult) stem cells, but also non-cloned embryonic stem cell linesthat do not run the risk of opening the door to human clonal reproduction (and that, it should be added, will not require commodifying women's reproductive tissues in order to provide the enormous numbers of eggs that will be needed to create the cloned embryos). Should these other alternatives fail, and should animal cloning experiments demonstrate the unique therapeutic potential of stem cells derived from embryo cloning, Congress could later revisit this issue and consider lifting the ban on the cloning of embryos. H.R. 1644, in fact, provides for just such a review of the relevant scientific and therapeutic possibilities, as does H.R. 2172 (the Greenwood-Deutsch bill).

As the composition of the panel of witnesses before you today makes clear, the issue of human cloning is most emphatically not an issue of pro-life versus pro-choice. It is not mainly about death and destruction, and it is not about a woman's right to choose. It is only and emphatically about baby design and manufacture, the opening skirmish of a long battle against eugenics and against the post-human future. Once embryonic clones are produced in laboratories, the eugenic revolution will have begun, and we will have lost our best chance to do anything about it.

The present danger posed by human cloning is, paradoxically, also a golden opportunity. The prospect of cloning, so repulsive to contemplate, is the occasion for deciding whether we shall be slaves of unregulated innovation and, ultimately, its artifacts, or whether we shall remain free human beings who guide our medical powers toward the enhancement of human dignity. The preservation of the humanity of the human future is now in our hands.

[1] HSCNTT is defined as the act of "transferring the nucleus of a human somatic cell into an egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed or rendered inert."

[2] Readers of the bill may see this for themselves, by substituting the statutory definition of HSCNTT [provided in SEC. 1001. (a) (2)] into the first prohibition [SEC. 1001. (a) (1) (A): "It shall be unlawful to transfer or to attempt to transfer the nucleus of a human somatic cell into an egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed or rendered inert with the intent to initiate a pregnancy." That this is the correct meaning of what is prohibited can be confirmed by the appearance, in the description of the second prohibited act [SEC. 1001. (a) (1) (B)], of the phrase "cellular product resulting from HSCNTT," that is, the embryonic human clone. If the bill wanted explicitly to ban the act of so-called reproductive human cloning, the first prohibition could and should have read: "It shall be unlawful to use the cellular product of HSCNTT to initiate a pregnancy." Furthermore, such a proscription would have made the prohibition of shipping and transporting unnecessary.



LOAD-DATE: June 21, 2001