House Approves Strict Ban on Human Cloning

After contentious debate, House members on Tuesday approved a sweeping ban on human cloning, a divisive issue that echoes the quandary facing President Bush on stem cell research.

Representatives grappled for more than three hours with the moral and legal thicket of human cloning before voting, 265 to 162, to approve the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001. It would impose steep criminal and civil penalties on any individual violating the ban--even scientists who create cloned human cells solely for research purposes.

The penalties make participation in human cloning in any way--from creating cloned human cells to patients receiving medicine based on such research done abroad--subject to a felony conviction that could bring a 10-year prison term and, if done for profit, civil penalties of more than $1 million. Critics said the penalties could create a brain drain of scientists departing to work abroad.

A similar bill has been introduced in the Senate by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), but it is not clear if Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), who has said he opposes cloning “under virtually any circumstances,” will bring the measure to the floor. The White House has strongly backed the complete ban.

Although House members expressed universal opposition to reproductive cloning--the actual production of a cloned baby--they were deeply divided over whether human cells should be cloned solely to be used for the research and treatment of disease, a practice called therapeutic cloning. In California’s large delegation, only Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Long Beach) broke with his party’s leaders to vote against the ban.

A narrower, competing amendment that would have allowed cloning for research was defeated, 249 to 178.

The heated debate on human cloning was part primer on complicated medical science and part theology seminar. With charts and graphs, House members tackled one of the key issues facing elected officials in a world where the boundaries of science are ever-expanding: When does life begin?

As lawmakers gave their answers, many supporters of a ban on any form of human cloning talked about a vision of the future that not long ago would have seemed like science fiction: farms of human embryos, questions about the rights of cloned embryos, and parents producing designer children.

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which earlier this year held hearings on cloning, called it a “new brave world of Frankenstein science” and argued that even allowing research would be a “slippery slope.”

Backers of a limited ban rejected that view as an “excessive fear of science and the possibility of scientific research.” Instead, they recalled that most new inventions of medicine--from autopsies to vaccines to X-rays--have been greeted with skepticism and even outrage.

The science involved in cloning is closely related to stem cell research--the subject of much national debate in recent weeks as Bush has mulled his long-awaited decision on federal funding.

Stem cells are considered crucial to future medical breakthroughs. They make up the earliest form of human life and have the power to become nearly any other type of cell or tissue in the body. Scientists hope to learn how to fashion them into everything from replacement organs for transplants to new brain cells for Parkinson’s patients to new pancreas cells for diabetics.

More than 260 Congress members, including many staunch opponents of abortion, support federal funding for stem cell research that involves embryos created in fertility treatments that would otherwise be discarded. But cloned cells would be created just for research.

Unlike embryos created naturally when egg meets sperm, a clone would be created if an unfertilized egg were to be stripped of its DNA and infused with another person’s genetic material. Some scientists say stem cell research on cloned cells may offer the best hope for developing successful replacement body parts--in effect replacing a patient’s organ with a copy made based on her own genetic code. But that prospect was rejected as “ghoulish” by some who backed the total ban.

“It would reduce some human beings to the level of an industrial commodity,” said House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas). “It is an exploitative, unholy technique that is no better than medical strip-mining.”

In contrast, Rep. James C. Greenwood (R-Pa.), who sponsored the amendment allowing cloning for research, argued that such a view showed a fundamental lack of understanding of the issue.

“Some would say once you put Mr. Greenwood’s cheek cell in and it divides, it becomes a soul,” he said to supportive applause. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous.”

Furthermore, Greenwood said that if the ban on all human cloning was passed into law it would effectively prevent much of the highly anticipated benefits of stem cell research. “Stem cell research needs [the cloning process] for it to be effective,” he said before his measure was defeated. “If you kill this substitute, you kill that hope. Please don’t do it.”

Concern about the gray areas of scientific research at issue prompted Rep. Louise McIntosh Slaughter (D-N.Y.), a microbiologist, to express concern about whether the House was prepared for the discussion.

As Rep. Peter Deutsch (D-Fla.) struggled to lay out the science during discussion of the rule being considered to govern the bill’s debate, Slaughter interrupted him. “Mr. Deutsch, does it trouble you that with all the difficulty you have had explaining this that we are about to debate it?”

“In all my years in this chamber,” he said, “this is the least informed the members have ever been.”

“It’s frightening,” Slaughter said.

For many on the floor, the issue came down to sensitivity about creating any human life form with the intent of discarding it.

“Remember the purpose is to destroy [these embryos], and that assumes that embryos days old are not lives at all,” said Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.). “No matter how good the intention, this type of scientific experimentation endangers the very fabric of our society.”

But others argued that the bill, co-sponsored by Reps. Dave Weldon (R-Fla.) and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), is shortsighted and that the ban goes too far.

“Since when did outlawing research to cure horrifying diseases become the moral position?” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose). “You have the right to disagree [with the research], and no one will force you to accept a cure for your child’s cancer, but don’t stop other people from seeking a cure for their family members.”

Lofgren later made one final attempt to permit human cloning for research, offering an adjustment to the bill’s language after the Greenwood amendment failed. Talking about her elderly father, she said: “Don’t ask me to put a clump of cells ahead of my dad’s health.”