Balance on the Cloning Issue

On March 12, shortly after he announced he had cloned a sheep, Scottish researcher Ian Wilmut found himself facing concerned and befuddled legislators in the U.S. Congress. By the end of the hearing, all present had reached agreement on the need to somehow prevent Wilmut’s technique from being used to clone human beings.

Today, Congress is scheduled to hold its second hearing on the subject. But this time the atmosphere is expected to be less congenial, for sharp political divisions are appearing as legislators move from discussing ethics to drafting public policy. The sparks began flying Monday, when President Clinton proposed legislation that would ban cloning “for the purposes of creating a child” but permit researchers to use cloning techniques to copy human DNA from one cell and transplant it into another.

This exception would allow American scientists to continue research into, for example, how individual genes can be turned on and off. Without understanding that process, scientists say, they will never figure out how to cure diseases like cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy. The exception, however, has led several legislators to rally behind a stricter proposal introduced earlier this year in the House by Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers (R-Mich.).

The president’s legislation, based on recommendations by the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, is far more sensible than Ehlers’ vague 12-line bill, which could readily be interpreted as prohibiting all cloning of human cells. That would stymie vital research and even prohibit useful criminology techniques like polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, a kind of genetic “fingerprinting” that involves cloning human DNA.

Clinton’s proposed legislation will hardly end the controversy over human cloning. For instance, some people define an embryo (an egg whose cells have begun dividing after the introduction of DNA) as a “human being,” thus the legislation could be interpreted as preventing study of how pre-fetal cells divide. Such research is currently being conducted to figure out anomalies in cell division that cause life-threatening diseases like cancer.

Cloning is a dramatic example of science leapfrogging ahead of our ability to understand its social implications. Congress clearly needs to pull some reins to control its breakneck pace. But legislators must not yield to the kind of runaway anxieties that in the 1980s prompted some of them to propose prohibiting any alteration of human genes, only to back away once they learned that a ban would outlaw lifesaving treatments like chemotherapy and radiation.

The president’s legislation strikes a sensible balance, leaving open the door to some essential research but shutting it in the face of those who fail to realize, as Clinton put it, that “science is not god.”