SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. B06

LENGTH: 524 words

HEADLINE: Embryo Ethics

BODY:


THOUGH STILL publicly wavering on whether to support funding for stem cell research, the Bush administration has begun wading into the tangle of issues that accompany the new reproductive technologies. A health official testifying before Congress last month signaled the administration's support for a bill to ban all human cloning. The cloning issue raises some of the same ethical questions as the hotly contested matter of stem cells. But the moral calculus is different in the two cases. Federal funding for cloning is already barred, but opposition to cloning need not mean opposition to funding for experiments on embryonic stem cells. The central issue in both debates is how to weigh respect for the special status of human embryos against the good to be obtained from medical advances. With embryonic stem cells, virtually all scientists agree, enormous relief from human suffering can be achieved if existing research is stepped up. The super-versatile early cells, not yet differentiated into organs, hold out the hope of curing Parkinson's, spinal cord injuries, juvenile diabetes and other miserable diseases.

Some antiabortion groups argue an absolute moral status for embryos and suggest that research be confined to "adult stem cells" taken from other body tissues. But many other prominent antiabortion activists -- and, a new poll shows, majorities of both American Catholics and evangelicals -- reject the need for such a scientific sacrifice. No one knows yet if adult stem cells have comparable potential. And scientific progress can lose years when shunted into artificial pathways.

The proposed guidelines before the Bush White House build in safeguards that reduce the moral conflict. They would allow funding for research only on excess frozen embryos left over from private-sector fertility treatments, slated for destruction and obtained with donors' consent only after the decision not to implant them. Federally funded scientists could use only stem cells derived by others. Far from creating a culture of institutionalized callousness toward embryonic life, federal funding rules would bring ethical restrictions to embryo research that now proceeds privately without any. Indeed, such rules could well mean the destruction of fewer embryos, because stem cells once derived reproduce indefinitely, and publicly funded research could produce a public resource of available cells. That can't happen if the rules are blocked and the research migrates underground or abroad, or if existing stem cell "lines" remain in the hands of corporations holding patents.

With cloning, too, many scientists argue that possible scientific benefits outweigh moral qualms. But those qualms are larger because, rather than using discarded embryos, so-called "therapeutic cloning" requires creating new embryos and then destroying them in order to grow new tissues or organs. Though the status of such embryos is debatable, the worry about a coarsening of sensibilities cuts deeper. Setting the issues side by side only underlines the strength of the argument for allowing stem cell funding to go forward.



LOAD-DATE: July 01, 2001