Nathan A. Berger, M.D.
Cleveland

The subject of cloning is rife with emotion, and the Brownback bill before the Senate is an emotional response that targets all forms of cloning with highly punitive consequences. This bill fails to distinguish between cloning that will create another human being versus cloning that will help treat and cure diseases, such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, diabetes, cancer and spinal cord injuries.

I urge Ohio citizens to contact their senators to ask them to vote against the Brownback bill, the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001, S. 1899, and to support S. 2439, a bill sponsored by Sens. Arlen Specter, Dianne Feinstein, Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy, which would prohibit human reproductive cloning while preserving important areas of medical research.

Therapeutic cloning, as the name implies, has the potential to improve the lives of nearly 100 million Americans who suffer from devastating diseases and conditions.

Therapeutic cloning allows genetic material to be used to develop advanced stem-cell therapies. These therapies could be tailored to match each patient's specific medical condition and dramatically reduce the possibility of the patient's immune system attacking and rejecting the therapy.

The Brownback bill would prohibit therapeutic cloning and research cloning. Under it, physicians hoping to relieve patient suffering and medical researchers attempting to discover cures could be subject to 10 years in prison and fines of up to $1 million.

The nation's leading scientists, including two prestigious committees of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association of the Advancement of Science, agree that cloning to reproduce humans should be illegal, but that therapeutic cloning should be permitted.

The men, women and children who suffer from life-threatening diseases are engaged in a race against time. It is our responsibility to make sure that they benefit as quickly as possible from the very best that science and technology has to offer.