SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A25

LENGTH: 730 words

HEADLINE: Personhood in a Petri Dish

BYLINE: Richard Cohen

BODY:


Come with me into Cohen's Lab. We are going to do some cloning. I have a client with Parkinson's disease, and so I take a cell from his tongue, extract the DNA from it, insert it into a human egg, zap the egg with electricity, add some chemicals (sorry, the exact formula is secret), wait about a day, extract the cells my patient needs and inject them into his brain so -- knock on wood -- he will have Parkinson's no more. It is at this point, if certain lawmakers have their way, that the cops will burst in, cuff me -- and throw me in jail for possibly 10 years.

How much of this is science fiction? Well, not the very first part about extracting the cell from the tongue and inserting the DNA into an egg. And not, would you believe, the last part, either. If a bill sponsored by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) passes, human cloning of any kind -- even just for medical purposes -- will become illegal. This bill has already passed the House. You might have noticed while in my lab that at no time was my human egg fertilized. So if you believe that life begins at conception, you are not getting life with this process. You might have noticed also that I did not let the process proceed for more than a day or so. I did not implant the egg into a womb, nor did I grow it until term in the lab. Even if I had done so, the bioethicist Arthur Caplan tells me, I probably would not have gotten a child out of the process.

But what you should notice above all is that my goal -- my sole intention -- is to alleviate human misery. I want to cure Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. I want to replace defective cells with brand-new ones, and because the donor and the recipient are one and the same, I don't have to worry about the body's rejecting the new cells. I don't want to make so-called designer babies, nor, for that matter, is there any chance at the moment I could. At the moment, the sad fact is that I cannot even make the cells I want. Someday, maybe, I can. Someday I -- which is to say "we" -- can have cures for diseases that now make life so miserable for so many.

The Brownback bill is supported by President Bush. No surprise there. In general, if you scratch an anti-cloner you will find someone opposed to abortion. (Although some pretty implacable abortion foes such as Sen. Orrin Hatch and former president Gerald Ford oppose the cloning ban.) And, for the most part, if you scratch someone in favor of experimental cloning (almost no one supports it for human reproduction) you will find someone supportive of abortion rights. So this debate really is an extension of our cultural division. It is, at bottom, about sex -- how to control it, how to punish it.

Brownback and his supporters are entitled to their beliefs. But they are primarily religious ones -- a determination that life begins when they believe it does. They feel so strongly about this that, in the Republican-controlled House, they rejected a substitute bill that would have permitted cloning for medical purposes only. Why? Because ultimately, they want to declare the fetus or the electrically zapped egg a person, protected by the Constitution. To destroy it is murder. Goodbye abortion.

But this bill is nothing less than an attempt to impose a religious doctrine on the rest of us. It is not that far removed from the Vatican's attempt to silence Galileo because he supported the Copernican theory that the earth revolved around the sun. It is an attempt by legislative fiat to stop science in its tracks: Thou Shalt Remain Ignorant.

But even the Vatican couldn't keep the earth from revolving around the sun. And not even Congress can stop medical research elsewhere in the world. If therapeutic cloning can be done, it will be done -- and the desperate (not to mention the affluent) will get on airplanes for their treatment. The rest will suffer or die -- all in the name of personhood for a bunch of cells in a petri dish.

I distantly fear, in some late-night movie sort of way, mad scientists giggling in the lab, whipping up batches of Saddam Husseins. But in medical research -- medical research above all -- it is inconceivable that the government would use its police powers not to impose standards but to enforce ignorance and, as a consequence, human suffering. I don't think a cloned cell is a person. But I am sure a Parkinson's sufferer is.



LOAD-DATE: May 30, 2002