BODY: Recently the U.S. House passed a bill that
would outlaw all forms of cloning with human DNA. The bill, if it becomes law,
would not only prohibit the cloning of human beings but prohibit the creation of
any cloned human embryonic cells.
The House is not the
only legislative body worrying about human cloning. More than
30 other nations, including Germany, France and Italy, have already outlawed all
forms of human cloning. President Bush has made it clear that
he wants to move toward outlawing all forms of human cloning
as soon as he returns to Washington.
Why all this
attention to cloning? The answer seems to be that legislators are panicking.
They are nervous because they are certain that someone is going to clone a human
being shortly. And if there are no laws against doing so, it will soon be too
late.
Are they right to be worried? Should your
president and congressman and you lie awake at night worrying about which clone
might soon be moving into the neighborhood?
Well,
actually, no. A lot of the fear driving the push to ban all forms of human
cloning is being fueled by the statements of kooks and cranks who should not
have the stage they occupy.
The most famous scientists
advocating human cloning and promising to do so soon are Severino Antinori,
Panayiotis Zavos and Brigitte Boisselier. They recently appeared before the
National Academy of Sciences to say that they intend to create a human clone in
the very near future.
The National Academy of Sciences
is the most important scientific organization in the United States. When it
holds a hearing on cloning, it gets attention, especially from the news media
and politicians. So why were three people with no background or qualifications
in human cloning testifying there? And is it really useful in making public
policy to lend credibility to the views of people who lack the qualifications
that are usually expected when people claim to be scientists?
Boisselier runs a lab for Clonaid, a front for the Raelian religious
movement, which believes that humans are a result of alien cloning and therefore
cloning technology brings us closer to the aliens who created us. Zavos has
published very little and nothing on cloning. Antinori is infamous for pushing
the envelope ethically in his reproductive work. None of the three has produced
any prominent, peer-reviewed, published research that bears on the safety
questions that cloning humans raises. None of the three has any standing in the
relevant scientific fields at stake in cloning. None of the three has been
engaged in the kind of animal experimentation that would allow them to perfect
the delicate techniques cloning requires to be successful. Each of these three
is lodged firmly on the far fringes of science.
When
the National Academy of Sciences chose to provide a highly visible platform to
people such as these, it not only gave them legitimacy - and blurred the line
between science and pseudo-science - but also created more fear than is
appropriate about the prospect of imminent human cloning.
At a time when many groups are attempting to legitimize pseudo-science,
from scientific creationists to alien abduction experts, it is imperative that
our leading institutions make clear the differences between good and bad
science. The academy failed in this mission when it let the kooks of cloning sit
as equals.
It is absolutely crucial that all voices,
even those on the fringe, be heard in making decisions about human cloning. But
it is equally important not to take a voice that is on the fringe and put it at
center stage. That is what happened when three people with no standing in the
scientific community were treated as legitimate scientists. The result is
legislation that while well-intended may rest upon a set of faulty assumptions
about what human cloning is and how soon it is going to be attempted.
Science should not get the last word about human cloning
legislation. But it must be heard, and when the line between what is reputable
and what is not becomes indistinct, it is hard to understand what scientists are
saying.
Arthur Caplan is director of the Center for
Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. David Magnus heads the center's
graduate studies program.
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