Lawmakers Propose Human Cloning Ban, Alien Order Notwithstanding

A star-shaped pendant around his neck, his hair gathered atop his head in a bun, the white-suited leader of a Canadian religious group told lawmakers Wednesday that they should no more block his plans to clone human beings than they would stop the development of antibiotics, blood transfusions, vaccines and other medical advances.

But shortly after hearing from Rael, who says cloning is a mandate conveyed to him by an extraterrestrial he met in 1973, several leading House members said they intend to pass a law this year to ban cloning as a means of human reproduction. President Bush also supports a ban on cloning and will work with Congress to pass one, his spokesman said Wednesday.

The French former journalist born as Claude Vorilhon, who now goes by the name Rael, claims he has funding and a list of 100 women who will help him clone a human. His scientific advisor, chemist Brigitte Boisselier, told a House panel Wednesday that a company affiliated with the Raelian movement had hired four researchers and had begun experiments using cow cells at an undisclosed U.S. location.

Another scientist, fertility specialist Panos Michael Zavos, founder and director of the Andrology Institute of America in Lexington, Ky., told lawmakers that he and an international team also intend to clone people who cannot have children by other means.

Rael made for an unusual appearance on a subject that scientists said is a truly serious matter. Four years after the birth of Dolly, the famous sheep that is the first successfully cloned mammal, cloning routinely produces cows, goats and mice with serious defects in their lungs, joints, hearts and immune systems. Three medical researchers told the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations that the same defects will arise if someone tries to clone humans.

“I don’t believe there is a single normal clone in existence. All clones have some defect,” said Rudolph Jaenisch, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said human cloning efforts are “totally irresponsible.”

It is unclear whether Rael and Zavos truly have the expertise and funding to try cloning. But federal officials view their claims with some measure of concern. The Food and Drug Administration this week warned Rael’s group that anyone trying cloning must apply for agency permission, and Zavos said FDA officials appeared in person at his Louisville, Ky., office on Tuesday to deliver a letter, which he had not yet read.

And lawmakers, after hearing from Zavos and Rael, said Wednesday that Congress should pass a federal ban on cloning to produce children. No such ban exists now, though prohibitions are on the books in four states, including California, and in 26 other nations.

“The groups we heard from today were serious enough for us to move forward to ban human cloning,” said Ken Johnson, spokesman for the Energy and Commerce Committee. He said the bill will be introduced by Rep. James C. Greenwood (R-Pa.) and “moved through committee” by Rep. W.J. “Billy” Tauzin (R-La.), its chairman.

At the White House, Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said: “The president believes that the moral and ethical issues posed by human cloning are profound and cannot be ignored. . . . The president believes that any attempt to clone a human being would present a grave risk to both the mother and the child. He opposes it on moral grounds.”

Fleischer said Bush will “work with Congress” on a ban “because the president believes that no research to create a human being should take place in the United States.”

Cloning is a method of producing a genetic copy of an individual. The technique involves removing DNA from an egg cell and replacing it with DNA from an adult. When the process is successful, the egg cell divides and grows into an embryo that has the same genes as the adult. The embryo is transferred to a surrogate mother and carried to term.

Tauzin said a federal law is needed because the FDA, in his view, did not truly have authority to ban cloning, even on grounds that it is unsafe. Even if that authority existed, he said, the FDA might one day be forced to approve cloning if the technique was perfected and could be proved safe.

However, crafting a cloning ban will be tricky, several witnesses testified. To begin with, they said, lawmakers will have to reckon with Supreme Court and lower federal court rulings which held that Americans have a constitutional right to have biological children and to make reproductive decisions without government interference.

Federal courts have struck down state laws that tried to restrict fertility techniques such as in vitro fertilization--the process of creating “test tube babies”--as a violation of a right to have children, said Mark D. Eibert, a lawyer and patient advocate from Half Moon Bay, Calif. “The federal government simply does not have the constitutional authority to decide which Americans can and cannot have children,” he said in written testimony.

Moreover, some question whether lawmakers can ban cloning as a reproductive technique while sidestepping the issue of whether it can be used as a medical tool. Some researchers envision a day when patients who need new heart tissue, brain cells or blood cells might be cloned to produce embryos that would be dissected for cells to be grown into new tissues for the patient.

Anti-abortion groups say a cloning ban should include these potential medical uses.

Johnson, the committee spokesman, suggested that Tauzin and Greenwood might craft a narrow bill that would bar cloning as a reproductive technique and remain silent on its use as a medical therapy.

Richard Doerflinger of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops said the debate would likely arise anyhow. His group would oppose, for example, a bill to allow the creation of cloned embryos but bar merely their transfer to a surrogate mother to produce children.

“If you leave people free to create these embryos by cloning, there are only two things you can do with them: You can let them live by putting them in a womb or destroy them,” Doerflinger said in an interview. “By banning one option you require the other. And so Congress might succeed in creating a class of embryos that it is a crime not to kill.”

Rael, in an interview, said that he is “almost 100% sure” that Congress will pass a ban on cloning, but he vowed to take his case to the Supreme Court, if necessary.