NIH Director Plays Down Cloning Effect

Testifying before a House subcommittee, the director of the National Institutes of Health said that cloning humans using the technique that produced a cloned sheep in Scotland would be “repugnant.” Dr. Harold E. Varmus said the technology is “fairly simple” but fails to address any scientific objective. “It makes interesting movies but poor science,” he said, and, as a result, would be of little interest to most researchers. Varmus said, however, that further research into cloning could teach science how to “turn on genes” so that tissue to treat disease could be made in the laboratory.