House Sets the Stage for Debate on the Cloning of Humans
The leader of a religious group devoted to UFOs and an American fertility specialist are scheduled to testify before a congressional panel this week about their efforts to clone people, in what is likely to be a step toward legislation banning the practice.
No federal law bars human cloning, and some legal experts doubt that the Food and Drug Administration has authority to regulate it, even though the agency has claimed jurisdiction. A 1998 attempt by lawmakers to ban the technique failed amid fighting between anti-abortion groups that oppose all human cloning and medical researchers who say the technology could be used to produce lifesaving organs and tissues for patients.
The religious leader--a French former journalist known as Rael--has claimed he has funding and a group of women willing to help him clone a human being. His group, which is based in Canada, believes that mankind was created by an advanced people from another planet and must also become creators of life.
The American scientist, Panos Michael Zavos of Lexington, Ky., says he is working with an Italian fertility doctor to try to clone people who cannot have children by other means.
Cloning experts have questioned whether the two efforts are credible, and they say any attempts at cloning people with current technology would run a high risk of producing stillborn and deformed children. One scientific organization said it opposes the idea of lawmakers giving Rael and Zavos a high-profile platform to publicize their cloning claims.
“I’m very concerned that they are just a huge anomaly, given that the scientific community is not out to clone people,” said Tim Leshan, director of public policy at the American Society for Cell Biology. “This will just be a circus atmosphere and make it seem like scientists are all out to do things that are immoral.”
Rep. W. J. “Billy” Tauzin (R-La.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he had carefully considered whether to offer a national stage to Rael and Zavos. He concluded that Rael had “a weird sort of background” but that “maybe Americans ought to know that, without laws to govern this, that’s the kind of thing that’s happening.”
Character Issue Cited
The hearing is a likely first step toward a new attempt to ban human cloning. Tauzin said there was broad support in Congress to move a bill this year, though he wanted to withhold his own judgment until after the hearing, scheduled Wednesday before the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations.
“I won’t kid you--I feel relatively strongly right now that there’s a problem with cloning a human being, and not just from a safety standpoint but from a legal and ethical standpoint,” Tauzin said.
Cloning, he said, “may literally threaten the character of our human nature. We are imperfect beings--all of us--and that requires us to develop traits of forgiveness, understanding, love and character. How is all that threatened when we produce perfect human beings? How would relations between women and men change when men are no longer necessary to produce human beings?”
Tauzin said opponents of cloning could either pass legislation banning the practice or direct the FDA to firm up its policies. He said the FDA’s current authority would likely allow it to ban cloning only on grounds that it is unsafe for the children who would be born and the mothers who carry them. The FDA has also said it could reject cloning proposals if the agency determines that the scientists involved are unqualified.
“That leaves open the question of whether the FDA would permit cloning a human being if it was satisfied on the safety concerns,” Tauzin said. “The FDA may have no authority to ban it on moral and ethical grounds” and so it might be forced to approve a cloning project if it found it to be safe.
In the 1998 debate, patients’ groups, including the American Heart Assn. and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, successfully argued that a cloning ban would also bar a potentially lifesaving technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or therapeutic cloning.
In cloning to produce children, a person’s DNA would be put into a human egg cell that has been stripped of its own DNA. The egg would be induced to grow into an embryo, which would be transferred to a woman and carried to term.
In therapeutic cloning, doctors would also use a patient’s DNA to create an embryo. But instead of the embryo growing into a child, cells would be grown as replacement tissues: new blood cells for leukemia patients, brain cells for Alzheimer’s patients, insulin-producing cells for diabetics and the like.
Because the cloned tissue would closely match a patient’s genetic makeup, the rejection problem common to organ and tissue transplantation would be eliminated, doctors believe.
Wide Backing in 1998
There was broad support in Congress in 1998 to ban cloning to produce children, but many lawmakers wanted to leave open the option of therapeutic cloning.
Anti-abortion groups, however, could not accept a bill that allowed the creation of human embryos and then required them to be destroyed by researchers.
Richard Doerflinger, a spokesman for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he was not sure how a bill could be written that avoided the dispute that sank the 1998 legislation.
He defended the House panel’s invitation to Rael and to his scientific advisor, Brigitte Boisselier, a visiting assistant professor of chemistry at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.
“I did chuckle when I heard they were going to testify, because they are a fringe group. But they’ve been on ’60 Minutes,’ so I guess they’re part of the debate,” Doerflinger said.
According to the Raelian Movement Web site, journalist Claude Vorilhon witnessed a UFO landing in central France on Dec. 13, 1973. An almond-eyed, 4-foot-tall alien emerged and said that his people had created mankind. The extraterrestrial gave Vorilhon the name Rael and asked him to build an “embassy” so that the two races could meet.
Rael says he is trying to build a $20-million embassy near Jerusalem and has raised $7 million for the project. His group claims 55,000 members.
Rael and Boisselier are among 15 witnesses scheduled for the hearing. Others include biologists who have cloned animals and ethicists who support or oppose cloning to produce children.
