Far Cry From Frankenstein
A Massachusetts biotech company’s announcement earlier this week that it had created a cloned human embryo has prompted many legislators to call for an immediate ban on research that some see as ghoulish.
Cloning aimed at replicating humans is ethically troubling, not to mention medically reckless. But scientists are hardly, as Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) claimed this week, “on the verge of having human embryo farms in laboratories all across America.”
In fact, Advanced Cell Technology’s big breakthrough is a yawn. Far from creating some sinister, Michael Crichton-style organ farm, the company’s scientists only managed to get a single egg to divide into six cells, far short of the several hundred cells needed to meet Webster’s Medical Dictionary’s definition of “embryo”: “an animal in the early stages of growth and differentiation that are characterized by cleavage, the laying down of fundamental tissues, and the formation of primitive organs and organ systems.”
On Monday, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) joined Smith and leaders of 10 religious and anti-abortion groups to urge the Senate “to pass a complete ban on human cloning immediately.” Rather than passing hasty and overbearing legislation that would ban both “therapeutic” and human cloning--thus halting the most hopeful research into Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis and other diseases that ravage bodies and devastate families--Congress should quickly pass a more sensible and scientifically astute bill by Rep. James C. Greenwood (R-Pa.). This legislation would ban what rightly worries most Americans: cloning aimed at producing a child.
President Bush, who on Monday said he was deeply troubled by the Massachusetts firm’s decision to “grow life to destroy it,” could also help. He could encourage greater moral and ethical scrutiny of cloning by moving up his deadline for naming members to his Bioethics Advisory Commission from the end of December to the end of this week.
All scientists, even those working on biotechnology’s frontier, should be subject to laws reflecting national values. But the researchers at Advanced Cell Technology are not the evil Dr. Frankensteins that some legislators are making them out to be. As Rep. Greenwood pointed out in a congressional debate about cloning two months ago, “Some will say, ‘But wait a minute, once you put Mr. Greenwood’s cheek cell into this empty cell and it divides, we have a soul.’ ... That’s ridiculous.”
