12-01-2001

LOBBYING: Lobbyists Line Up Over Cloning

The day before Thanksgiving, Carl Feldbaum, president of the Biotechnology
Industry Organization, got a surprise message from Advanced Cell
Technology that put a kink in his holiday. The Worcester, Mass.-based
company said it would announce over the weekend that it had manufactured
cloned embryos. "I didn't have much of a Thanksgiving weekend,"
Feldbaum said, because the announcement "caught a lot of people
unexpectedly."


Whether Advanced Cell Technology's experimentation was a scientific
success is unclear because the nine embryos died quickly. But one thing is
certain: The company has poured fuel on the raging controversy over the
cloning of humans and the use of stem cells from embryos.


The September 11 attacks had briefly smothered the debate. But on the
heels of the cloning announcement, the political temperature is rising
again, as pro- and anti-cloning groups step up their lobbying in advance
of a Senate debate to be held in March, and perhaps sooner if anti-cloning
activists get their way.


Hours after Advanced Cell Technology's announcement made news on November
26, a diverse coalition of activists who oppose human cloning stood with
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and denounced the company's research. This
odd-bedfellows coalition of both anti-abortion and abortion-rights groups,
social conservatives, environmentalists, and others had previously helped
persuade the House in July to pass a bill that would ban the creation of
cloned human embryos for birth, for use in transplants, or for
experiments.


At the center of the coalition are anti-abortion groups such as the
National Right to Life Committee, which has devoted as much as one-third
of its public policy budget this year to cloning and stem-cell issues. In
the first six months of 2001, the NRLC spent $418,000 on lobbying, not
counting funds spent on grassroots campaigns, said Legislative Director
Douglas Johnson.


The coalition also includes the Bioethics Project, headed by The Weekly
Standard's William Kristol, which has a budget of almost $50,000; Friends
of the Earth, headed by Brent Blackwelder, which has allocated up to
$100,000 to human biotech issues; and the left-leaning Center for
Technology Assessment, headed by Andrew Kimbrell, which has set aside 20
percent of its $900,000 budget for such issues. Other allies, such as the
left-of-center Council for Responsible Genetics in Cambridge, Mass., and
Judy Norsigian, a feminist writer, have impact because they can deliver an
anti-cloning pitch to Democrats.


The sizable pro-cloning faction seems to have greater financial resources,
although its spending is difficult to track. Cutting-edge research firms
and universities are largely represented by Feldbaum's group, BIO, while
scientist-entrepreneurs are well-represented by professional associations
such as the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, and
by their individual universities, such as Harvard and Rockefeller
universities. These organizations stress that they support clinical
cloning for research purposes only.


In the first six months of 2001, BIO spent $1.63 million on lobbying; the
group has 14 in-house lobbyists and has contracts with 10 K Street firms.
As of November 1, BIO's political action committee had donated $24,250 in
the current election cycle, compared with $13,750 contributed during the
entire 1999-2000 cycle.


Overall, the executives and companies in the biotech industry as well as
those in the much broader pharmaceutical sector contributed $26 million
during the 1999-2000 election cycle. And in 1999, they spent $90 million
on lobbying, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive
Politics.


It is difficult to gauge how much of this spending was devoted to
stem-cell and cloning issues, rather than to other industry issues such as
patent rights, taxes, the federal drug-approval process, and
privacy.


No company has said it has plans to bring a human clone to birth, and no
company other than Advanced Cell Technology has announced that it hopes to
create embryos from which to derive stem cells. But many biotech companies
and universities, especially those that have worked on the Human Genome
Project, fear that curbs on cloning could lead to restrictions on the use
of stem cells or other material derived from cloned embryos.


Those who favor stem-cell research say the science holds out hope for
curing deadly or crippling diseases and for curing genetic-based
attributes. Curbs on cloning could ripple through the biotech sector,
hurting many companies and universities that might otherwise sell data,
materials, and expertise to clone-making research firms. Roughly 45 member
companies in BIO could have their plans crimped by anti-cloning
legislation, Feldbaum predicted.


Feldbaum says his industry's clout on Capitol Hill comes partly from
personal connections. "You tend to know whether somebody in Congress
has a powerful interest in one disease or another, because of a family
member or friend or group of constituents," he said.


Politicians are also influenced by the authority often accorded to
scientists, and by the opinions of individual scientists from their
states, said Patrick Wilson, the director of legislative relations for the
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. "The local
universities are very important, arguably more important than an
individual scientist, because politicians think about jobs and economic
impact ... and state prestige."


Even more influential, Feldbaum said, are the many disease-fighting groups
because "they're the ones who have the greatest need and the
strongest advocates," and, "are by far the most powerful
witnesses on issues."


Neil Munro

National Journal