A Tempest in a Petri Dish
Last Sunday’s report of the first cloning of a human embryo had pundits wringing their hands. The announcement by a small biotech firm in Massachusetts, however, was pure hype. The researchers had not even formed viable human embryos--just fertilized eggs, whose nuclei had been replaced, that divided a few times, then died. South Korean researchers reported the same results a few years ago. Such experiments are a long way from human cloning, since a few cellular divisions can occur even in the absence of viable chromosomes.
But the reports couldn’t have come at a better time for Congress, which is eager to regulate this arena and is planning to take action early next year. We have to hope that this time out lawmakers will come up with something different from the Weldon-Stupak bill, a draconian measure, passed by the House last July, that would make scientists using cloning techniques in their quest for treatments for Parkinson’s, diabetes and other diseases subject to 10 years in prison. The bill also would criminalize the importation of the products of such research, meaning that if progress were made in Britain, where such research is legal, and Americans went there for treatment, they could be jailed upon their return for bringing home the cells in their flesh.
It is frightening that an arcane theological debate about whether or not a speck of cells is a human being could force a promising field of basic biomedical research to flee the United States for foreign countries. A consensus will never exist about moral questions of this sort. Even in the religious community, opinions differ. In Judaism and Islam, personhood begins about a month after conception; before a proclamation by Pope Pius IX in 1869, even in Catholicism, ensoulment occurred, not at conception, but after three to six months.
Religion has an important place in our hearts and lives, but it should not shape science policy. If Catholic dogma were our guide, birth-control pills would be illegal, children of in-vitro fertilization would not exist and evolution would only recently have been taught in schools.
To oppose therapeutic cloning or its funding is one thing, to criminalize it quite another. It is beyond me how a majority of our congressional representatives could argue for this when it is legal to have an abortion or to discard an embryo for any reason whatsoever. Do they see no inconsistency in guarding the right to destroy a 3-month-old fetus, while putting a doctor in jail for an experiment on a microscopic dot of cells that could legally be flushed down a toilet?
To imbue a few cells in a petri dish with human rights defies common sense. These cells lack a fundamental necessity for coming into our world--a connection to a warm, nurturing womb. Elevating their protection above the needs of medical research that might save millions of people suffering from diseases shows a profound disregard for human life.
Some argue that blocking this research will stop cloning. But they are deluding themselves. Since 1997, there have been several hundred live births of cloned animals, and the majority of them have survived without detectable health problems. Cloning a human is too dangerous at present, but wait a few years. We will see a human clone within the decade, and it won’t destroy our values any more than a “test tube” baby did.
Do people’s brains go dead when they hear the word “clone”? I’ve heard otherwise sane individuals respond with diatribes about growing people to harvest their organs. But chopping an organ out of a clone would be just as much a murder as killing any other person. Clones are merely delayed identical twins. You may already know one. Identical twins are clones, and though they’re similar, they’re unique individuals.
But perhaps clones are only the beginning. Might we not slide down a slippery slope into a dehumanized nightmare? Not as long as we remain capable of making nuanced moral judgments. Anyway, if this is a slippery slope, we are probably already on it. I suspect our path is more a slippery sidewalk. We may take a spill or two, but we’ll get up, brush ourselves off and continue on our way.
If human cloning is enough to bring down civilization, heaven help us, because throwing up obstacles to regenerative medicine is not going to save us. We are unraveling human biology, and many coming developments will be discomforting. But vaccines, antibiotics, organ transplants and test-tube babies were also initially viewed as unnatural.
We can’t avoid the coming advances and wouldn’t want to if we could. They offer too many potential benefits. The real question is not how we handle embryonic stem cells or genetically altered foods or any other specific technology, but whether we will continue to embrace the possibilities of the future or will pull back and relinquish these explorations to other braver souls in other regions of the world.
We can choose to give up our leadership in medical research and watch the British or the Chinese set the course, but that will signal our decline. Our fall may take a while, but it will come.
In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack and the anthrax mailings, it is obvious that we face enemies and dangers. Cloning and other advanced medical technologies, no matter how much they shake up our worldviews, are essentially on the side of life. They are intended to enhance our well-being, not hurt us. The real dangers from biotechnology come not from this quarter, but from groups who have gone over to the dark side to weaponize ancient human enemies like plague and smallpox. We should not be so cavalier about stifling basic biomedical research, because, ultimately, it may be what saves us.
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Gregory Stock directs the program on medicine, technology and society at UCLA’s School of Medicine. His forthcoming book, “Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future,” will be available in March.
