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ASRM BULLETIN
Volume 4, Number 3
January 16,
2002
President's Council on Bioethics to Examine Human
Cloning
Tomorrow and Friday, the new President's Council on Bioethics will meet
for the first time in Washington, DC. The Council, chaired by University
of Chicago Professor Leon Kass, MD, PhD, was created by executive order
"to, among other things, conduct fundamental inquiry into the moral and
human meaning of developments in biomedical science and
technology."
The meeting's agenda opens with sessions on
"Science and the Pursuit of Perfection" and "How to Do Bioethics." The
Council will discuss Hawthorne's short story, "The Birthmark," in which a
scientist-physician obsessed with his beautiful wife's one physical flaw,
works to discover the way to correct it, succeeds in removing the mark,
but fails ultimately in that he causes her death. Also discussed will be a
paper by Valparaiso University Professor of Christian Ethics, Gilbert
Meilander.
All of this leads up to the presentation of several
working papers on human cloning. It appears that the emphasis will
probably be on reproduction/procreation rather than on the uses of
therapeutic cloning for regenerative medicine.
The names of the
Council membership have just been announced by the White House. See http://www.whitehouse.gov/. More
news on the meeting in the next Bulletin.
California Committee Urges Legislature to Approve Human Cloning for Research and Therapy
California's Advisory Committee on Human Cloning, established in 1997
when the state passed a five-year moratorium on human cloning, has
delivered its report to the legislature, which is set to consider it this
week. The Committee recommended unanimously that non-reproductive cloning
be permitted in California for purposes such as research into the
therapeutic use of embryonic stem cells.
Regulation was
deemed essential and would include prohibition of the use of pre-embryos
after the development of the primitive streak, requirement that persons
providing cells for experimentation provide informed consent, and that
research proposals be reviewed by an approved Institutional Review Board.
The Committee also unanimously agreed that human reproductive cloning be
banned.
If California lawmakers follow these recommendations and
permit cloning for scientific and therapeutic purposes, their legislation
will apply only to privately-funded academic or commercial researchers.
Federal policy, as delivered by President Bush in his August 9, 2001 Stem
Cell Address, permits federal funding only for work on designated stem
cell lines derived before that date.
For the Committee's report,
see http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/cloningreport/
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