BODY: In a backlash against the onrush
of biomedical research into areas that raise moral and ethical issues, the House
of Representatives passed a bill this week that would ban all human cloning and subject anyone who violates the ban to criminal
penalties and huge civil judgments. Unfortunately, in their zeal to legislate
morality and cover their flanks from the religious right, the legislators may
put a crimp in research that has promising medical benefits. Once the nature of
the work is understood, most citizens would accept the very limited form of
cloning involved as a useful scientific tool.
Congress
seems to have been spooked by an exaggerated fear that science is going too far
too fast. The summer started with President Bush wrestling with an issue that
seems, by contrast, relatively simple -- whether to allow federal funding of
research on stem cells derived from very early stage embryos, called
blastocysts, that are produced in surplus at fertility clinics. This issue
raises moral and ethical questions because religious conservatives consider the
blastocysts an early form of human life, potentially capable of growing into a
fetus and ultimately a newborn child. Others, including this page, consider the
blastocysts to be microscopic balls of cells that have no chance of becoming
human in a petri dish outside the womb. They are fit subjects for research on
therapies that could benefit all humankind.
Many
legislators found this research easy to accept because it involves gaining
medical benefit from surplus embryos that would be destroyed by the fertility
clinics in any event. Then came word that scientists in Virginia had created
their own blastocysts from scratch, and that a small biotechnology company in
Massachusetts planned to clone them from adult cells. The House dug in its heels
quickly, frightened by visions of Dolly the cloned sheep and boasts by fringe
groups that somehow, somewhere, they intend to clone a human being.
The legislators were overreacting. The cloning would be
used only to create a clump of cells for research to devise cures for
devastating diseases. The company had no intention of implanting the blastocysts
in a womb in a misguided attempt to produce a cloned child -- an area where
Congressional intervention would be appropriate.
The
Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001 passed the House by a hefty 265-to-162
margin. If the Senate concurs, it would make human cloning a criminal offense
carrying penalties of up to 10 years in jail and would impose civil penalties,
if pecuniary gain is involved, of at least $1 million, even if the cloning was
for therapeutic purposes. That would be a shame, given the nature of the work
proposed.
The Massachusetts company simply wants to
remove the nucleus from a female donor's egg, insert a cell from the skin of
another donor, and then stimulate the egg to reprogram the genes of the skin
cell to start growing into a blastocyst. The company would then derive stem
cells from the blastocyst and try to coax them into becoming virtually any kind
of cell needed to repair the human body, potentially providing treatments for a
wide range of ailments, from Alzheimer's to heart disease.
The cloning approach has one tremendous advantage over using stem cells
from surplus embryos at fertility clinics -- the resulting therapeutic cells
would be genetically matched to the patient who provided the skin cell, making
any treatment far more likely to work. This is an area of research that should
not be foreclosed simply because some people regard the blastocyst as sacrosanct
or because they fear a slippery slope toward reproductive cloning of humans.
President Bush opposes all human cloning. But the Senate needs to take a more
discriminating approach that would allow therapeutic cloning and simply ban
reproductive cloning, which is too dangerous to attempt now and which most
legislators find abhorrent.
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