Congress Debates Cloning's Two Branches

Tom Abate
San Francisco Chronicle
June 17, 2002

We remember Solomon as the wise man who once settled a dispute between two women who claimed the same child by ordering the baby split down the middle.

When one woman offered to surrender her claim rather than see the order carried out, Solomon judged her the true mother and awarded her the child.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill should consider that parable as they ponder their next steps, given the stalemate over cloning legislation that occurred in the Senate last week.

One Senate faction had sought to ban all human cloning, regardless of whether the process is used to make babies or create stem cell medicines. But that bill now appears to be badly flagging, if not dead.

There seems to be more life in a rival bill, advanced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to outlaw baby cloning but permit cloning research in connection with stem cell therapy.

An aide said Feinstein still hopes that, by adding extra rules to prevent research clones from being diverted into reproductive cloning labs, she can round up the 60 votes needed to prevent a filibuster and get a bill passed.

But even if Feinstein gets her legislation through the Senate, it would still run afoul of the total cloning ban that passed the House of Representatives last July with White House support.

Passage of Feinstein's measure would put the onus on a House-Senate conference committee to reconcile differences between religious and scientific groups who consider their principles so important they refuse to compromise.

The religious camp considers human embryos to be human beings and insists they must be protected from destruction. The scientific community refuses to accept what it sees as political restrictions on promising research.

If both sides refuse to bend, the United States will find itself back where it stood in 1998, when federal lawmakers, prodded by the birth of Dolly the sheep, first tried to pass a ban on human cloning, only to stumble upon the same impasse.

Feinstein, who had a legislative hand in the 1998 failure, seems to be betting that if her current bill emerges from the Senate, the opposition will conclude this time that a ban on reproductive cloning is better than doing nothing.

"If we hit a conference committee, the Senator hopes there are members in the House, and the White House, who will realize that the only way this legislation is going to happen is if reproductive cloning is separated from research that could lead to life-saving medicines," said Howard Gantman, a spokesman for Feinstein.

He said Feinstein would not embrace a proposal floated in the Senate last week to seek a two-year moratorium on research cloning while regulations to police the practice are put in place.

"It would put a complete stop to medical research," he said.

Ironically, Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., author of the House's total ban on cloning and the person who would dicker with Feinstein in conference committee negotiations, also dissed that notion.

"A moratorium is an empty gesture," Weldon said in a statement, insisting that any legislation "draw a clear ethical line that says cloning humans for experimental research and then killing them is unacceptable."

Thus House and Senate leaders seem to be saying that if they can't have their way with the embryo, then it's fine with them if anybody with a petri dish and the know-how clones a human being for any purpose.

That's a far cry from the wisdom of Solomon, and poor public policy at a time when crackpot scientists are racing to make babies using a technology known to cause defects in animal experiments.

"Failure to pass legislation banning reproductive cloning would be a tragedy, and dangerous," said Rich Hayes, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, an Oakland group that has been trying to forge a middle ground between the scientific and religious extremes.

"Further polarization on cloning legislation is irresponsible," Hayes said. "Both sides are going to have to compromise."

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