Embryo Research: Muddy Policy

President Clinton’s veer to the right since the election is understandable. But his hasty action late Friday to forbid government-backed research on human embryos created in the laboratory is troubling--not just because he has blocked potentially valuable research but because of what it reveals about policy-making chaos at the White House.

Soon after his inauguration in 1993, Clinton reversed the ban on fetal-tissue research. Later he signed legislation to open research on embryos. A panel of 19 leading doctors, lawyers and ethicists labored for nearly a year to write research rules, and an advisory committee of the director of the National Institutes of Health approved them Friday.

Then, without informing even the NIH director, Clinton torpedoed most of the work. While banning creation of embryos solely for research, Clinton left open limited experimentation on “spare” embryos derived from couples in fertility programs.

Citing possible gains in treating infertility, birth defects, genetic defects and cancer, the NIH panel had urged research in which artificially fertilized human-egg cells would be studied for up to two weeks, before first signs of a nervous system, and then destroyed. Such cell masses, it said, did not have the “same moral status” as infants.

Realizing it was venturing into choppy moral waters, stirring public fears of bizarre Frankenstein-like tinkering, the panel rejected more daring procedures, such as cloning of embryos and transfer of human embryos into animals.

Still the proposal met stiff opposition. In a letter written by Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), 35 members of Congress complained of “bizarre experiments” that involved the “destruction of human beings.”

One does not have to accept this definition of the start of human life to have qualms about this research. Even several members of the NIH panel, despite surface unanimity, had private doubts, given the unimpressive results of previous embryo research and the failure yet to persuade the public that this research was valuable.

Undoubtedly all this influenced Clinton’s action, as well as concerns that the new Republican majority could use the issue to cut other parts of the federal biomedical research budget. But Clinton’s ham-handed reaction suggests he is more concerned about reelection than making sound science policy.