08-04-2001

HEALTH: What Cloning Has Wrought

Of one thing, I have no doubt. The growing use of reprogenetics
[reproductive biology and genetics] is inevitable. For better and worse, a
new age is upon us--an age in which we as humans will gain the ability to
change the nature of our species.


-Lee M. Silver, a Princeton University professor of molecular biology and
public affairs, in his 1998 book, Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering
and Cloning Will Transform the American Family


Four years after the world said hello to Dolly, the cloned sheep from
Scotland, and three years after Silver wrote his provocative book pushing
cloning techniques, Congress and interest groups are discovering that a
new age has, indeed, arrived.


This new age has forced lawmakers to confront issues many of them would
just as soon ignore. It's also scrambled interest-group alliances so
thoroughly that organizations that otherwise detest one another find
themselves working on the same side of the cloning issue.


Consider the debate on the bill that the House passed on Tuesday, 265-162,
to ban both public and private use of human-cloning technology for any
purpose. Two hundred Republicans, 63 Democrats, and two independents voted
for the measure.


The bill-sponsored by Reps. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., and Bart Stupak,
D-Mich.-sets a 10-year prison sentence and a $1 million penalty for
scientists who carry out human cloning, whether for the purpose of
creating a baby (sometimes called reproductive or birth cloning), or for
creating embryonic clones to extract their cells (sometimes called
research or therapeutic cloning). The bill also prohibits the importation
of cloned embryos and products derived from them.


The Weldon-Stupak bill was pitted against a less restrictive one proposed
by Reps. Jim Greenwood, R-Pa., and Peter R. Deutsch, D-Fla. Their bill
would have banned reproductive cloning but allowed research cloning. One
goal of research cloning is to find ways to heal patients using their own
tissues. Embryos containing a patient's DNA would be used to create
tissues or organs that could replace defective ones in that
person.


It's an understatement to say that the cloning issue has created some
strange political bedfellows. Ardent anti-abortion groups and a loosely
organized politically left-of-center coalition have found themselves
united in their opposition to human-cloning procedures. Their
better-organized opponents include patients' advocacy groups and the
biotechnology industry, which is represented by the Biotechnology Industry
Organization, a lobbying group that boasts more than 1,000
clients.


Wesley J. Smith, a self-proclaimed Ralph Naderite who opposes all
human-cloning projects, sees the irony of the situation. "It's like,
pinch me, pinch me, take a picture. Who would have thought they'd be
smiling at each other?" said Smith, author of the book Culture of
Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America.


If a measure similar to the milder Greenwood bill is pushed in the Senate
over one proposed by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., that mirrors the
House-passed bill, those who support a ban on reproductive cloning will
look to see how biotech groups react. Some critics suggest that the
biotech industry's support of the Greenwood bill in the House was more a
matter of expediency than of conviction, and that the industry hopes to
bury any anti-cloning measure in the Senate. Likewise, anti-abortion
groups will have to decide whether to go along with a version of the
Greenwood bill in the Senate if the alternative is no legislation at
all.


What is quite clear is that in this new age, cloning opponents come at the
issue for different reasons.


Some social justice advocates oppose cloning because they fear a widening
gap between the haves and have-nots if affluent parents decide to
genetically "enhance" their children. The United Methodist
Church, which supports abortion rights, has come out strongly against the
"commercialization of human life." Several environmental groups
oppose any tinkering with the natural world, on the grounds that the right
to clone a human or embryo would open the floodgates to additional
bioengineering experiments on plants, animals, and ecosystems. Civil
rights factions dread a new kind of racism and eugenics reminiscent of
Adolf Hitler's Germany. Some disability rights groups worry about being
viewed as misfits in a society trying to manufacture perfection. And
various scientists fear both the prospect of "designer babies"
and the possible defects that may result from cloning.


Much more publicized is the view of the better-organized anti-abortion
groups who see cloning as a sanctity-of-life issue. "Our purpose is
precisely [to oppose] the destruction of the embryo," says Douglas
Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.
"There should be an honest debate whether we want to live in a
country where human embryos are mass-produced."


Women are a target audience sought by both sides in the debate. Feminist
leader Judy Norsigian, executive director of Boston Women's Health Book
Collective, has entered the fray by calling for a ban on
reproductive-cloning experiments and for a five-year moratorium on
research cloning. But many liberal women's groups are reluctant to endorse
her views, because she is on the same side as their archenemies: those
seeking to put an end to legalized abortion. Norsigian argues that cloning
technology can be developed only through "mass experimentation on
women and children." Several women who are abortion-rights activists
balked at any suggestion that Norsigian was speaking for them. Cloning,
they say, doesn't fit their agenda, because they "don't consider it
an issue of reproductive rights."


But one scientist calls this poor reasoning. "Reproductive rights and
reproductive autonomy is not the same thing as doing whatever you want to
with human embryos, turning them into products," said Stuart Newman,
a professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College and a
member of the board of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Council for Responsible
Genetics. The group, which Newman terms "well left of center,"
lacks visibility but is fairly active in the debate. Its board is chaired
by Claire Nader (Ralph's sister), and draws a fair number of its members
from the New Left's Science for the People group-scientists and students
concerned about abuses in science and technology.


"In fact," Newman notes, "there's a real emphasis on the
harm to women by having embryos and eggs being saleable commodities.
Reproductive autonomy is not [about] having the right to choose the
characteristics of the next generation."


Norsigian's job with the CRG has been to enlist other feminists in the
fight; so far, Ruth Hubbard, Barbara Seaman, and Naomi Klein have signed
on. But others have resisted. Katha Pollitt, a columnist for the liberal
magazine The Nation, calls Norsigian's belief that cloning poses a serious
threat to women or to anyone else "nutty."


Yet others, such as Rosemary Dempsey, director of the Washington office of
the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy Inc., are stepping gingerly
into an area where several of their peers in the abortion-rights movement
won't go.


Dempsey says it's premature for her group to take a position on
reproductive cloning. "What's at the bar right now is the whole
aspect of `Do we let abortion politics get in the way of saving lives?' If
some kind of anti-cloning bill was used to say that from the moment of
conception fetal rights would trump women's rights, we'd consistently
oppose that kind of thing," Dempsey said.


At a San Francisco-based organization called the Exploratory Initiative on
the New Human Genetic Technologies, Director Richard Hayes is dismayed
that prestigious scientists have been working to encourage public
acceptance of a future of human clones and "designer babies."
These advocates include James Watson, a Nobel laureate who is now
president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, a research
institute for molecular biology, and Lee Silver, the Princeton molecular
biology professor.


Hayes's group believes that there is a middle position between that of
anti-abortion activists who resist all embryo research and that of biotech
promoters who oppose any social controls. "We should ban the creation
of human clones," says Hayes, "and at least have a moratorium on
the creation of clonal embryos." Hayes, who supports abortion rights,
says that there is a clear difference between a women's desire to
terminate an unwanted pregnancy and the desire to create genetically
duplicate human beings. "We can support the former and still strongly
oppose the latter," he declares.


Still others who want to ban human cloning hope to push the issue out of
the abortion debate-because, as one ban backer puts it, "when the
Religious Right comes out, Democrats get scared."


As the debate progresses, the anti-cloning forces on the left will be
weighing whether to join forces, perhaps by creating an umbrella
organization. That prospect seems more likely than does the chance of the
Left and the Right joining hands, or even standing near each other, at the
same press conference.


Cloning opponents can cite polls showing significant public opposition to
human cloning. A Gallup Poll of 1,012 adults taken in May showed that 89
percent of Americans say that the cloning of humans-if it becomes
possible-should not be allowed.


Prospects for a broad cloning ban passing in the Democratic-controlled
Senate are not good. In 1998, the Senate rejected a bill similar to
Weldon's that was offered by Sens. Christopher S. Bond, R-Mo., Bill Frist,
R-Tenn., and Trent Lott, R-Miss.


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