7 Senators Back Legal Human Cloning for Research

As the president of a Massachusetts biotechnology firm announced ambitious plans Tuesday to use human cloning in disease research, seven senators said the controversial work should remain legal.

The House and some Senate Republicans have moved to bar human cloning for any purpose. Six of the senators, by contrast, said they would back legislation to outlaw cloning as a method to produce children while leaving scientists free to use it in the search for cures for disease.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who plans to introduce such a bill, said “it would be a very serious mistake” to bar cloning in disease research. The technique, he said, has great potential to save lives.

A similar bill has already been introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and four other Democratic senators. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) wants to keep cloning legal in disease research but has not endorsed any specific legislation, a spokesman said.

The announcements by these senators are significant, coming in the face of widespread calls to criminalize human cloning for both reproductive and research purposes. Cloning opponents, who include President Bush, say the technique is unethical in disease research because it entails creating human embryos only to destroy them.

The calls to ban human cloning have grown since a Massachusetts company, Advanced Cell Technology Inc., published a scientific paper two weeks ago claiming it had used the technique to produce human embryos.

Michael D. West, the company’s president, defended the work before a Senate panel Tuesday and said he planned to continue it.

“History will judge us harshly if we fail to recognize and deliberate carefully upon a medical technology that could alleviate the suffering of our fellow human beings,” West said in written testimony to the labor and health subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

In testimony, West said the company wants to clone patients to produce embryos, which at about six days would give rise to stem cells. Stem cells, in turn, could be grown into cells and tissues that patients need--such as heart cells for cardiac patients or brain cells for Alzheimer’s patients.

Because these cells would have the same genes as the patient, they might avoid tissue rejection, a common problem in organ transplants because the body is designed to expel foreign material.

Advanced Cell Technology opposes cloning to produce children.

West set an ambitious timetable for his company. He said that he would be “disappointed” if it failed within six months to grow human embryos long enough to produce stem cells, and then to prompt the stem cells to grow into heart, brain or other specialized cells that might be useful in treating disease.

That result would push well beyond the company’s current capabilities. The embryos it reported producing so far grew only for three days, and to no more than six cells. An embryo must grow for about six days, and to 100 or more cells, in order to produce stem cells.

Harkin, chairman of the Senate panel, appeared surprised by West’s timetable. “I find that exhilarating, quite frankly, that it is moving that rapidly,” Harkin said, adding that the announcement offered “hope to people with Parkinson’s disease” and other ailments.

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), however, called for a six-month moratorium on human cloning while the Senate considers what moral value it wants to assign to embryos, and what degree of protection.

“This is a moment in history, the history of humanity, that we should pause, just pause for a bit of time,” Brownback said. “Let’s really think through this decision. Is this [embryo] a person or not? Does this have moral significance or not?”

Ronald Green, an ethics advisor to West’s company and a religion professor at Dartmouth College, said that early-stage cloned embryos did not have equal moral standing to people whose lives might one day be saved through cloning-based medical treatments.

“These clusters of cells, while arguably worthy of some respect, lack most of the qualities we normally equate with a human life,” Green said. They “cannot think or feel,” he said, and they do not have specialized body parts.

West contended that an embryo is not a human being in its first two weeks of life. Rather, it contains the raw materials to build a human.

After two weeks, West said, the cells of the embryo begin to take on specialized functions and organize themselves into the primordial structure of a human. He said the two-week mark was “a bright line” that scientists should not cross in embryo experiments.