Cloning Receives a Makeover

They were up against some of the most powerful forces in politics: President Bush, the antiabortion movement and the Roman Catholic Church. But when patients and scientists set out this year to preserve human cloning as a legal tool of medical research, their toughest opponents also included a 24-year-old movie, “The Boys From Brazil.”

The 1978 thriller featured a rogue scientist trying to rebuild the Nazi movement by cloning Adolf Hitler, and it helped give cloning a creepy public image. Thanks in part to that image, a total ban on cloning passed the House last year by a 100-vote margin and seemed on its way to becoming law.

Today, however, some lawmakers who once denounced cloning have embraced it as a potential way to cure disease. And last week, the campaign to ban all human cloning collapsed in the Senate. Supporters of the ban acknowledged that they were well short of the 60 votes needed for passage, and they backed out of a debate on the Senate floor that they had been seeking for months.

Prospects for a total ban are now “substantially, substantially” reduced, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said, though they are not dead.

For a small group of lobbyists from the biotechnology industry, scientific societies and such patient groups as the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, derailing the effort to ban all cloning has been a major victory. It was accomplished through many of the traditional tools of Washington lobbying, including personal appeals to lawmakers, television advertising and placing opinion pieces in hometown newspapers.

But perhaps their most important success was in changing the perception of cloning among lawmakers. Cloning, in essence, was given a makeover.

“Cloning is an abstraction, and the battle has been a matter of trying to fill in that abstraction for the American public and policy-makers,” said David Prentice, a professor of life sciences at Indiana State University who is advising anti-cloning senators. “If you can control the terminology, then you control the debate.”

From their early organizational meetings in January, supporters of cloning in research decided to come up with new language to highlight that cloning could help sick patients. “We were battling a science fiction genre that had existed for 40 years,” said Michael Manganiello, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, which led the lobbying campaign in defense of research cloning. “What do you call this so that it’s not seen as science fiction?”

Two words were particularly problematic. One was “cloning” itself. The word refers to a range of scientific techniques for making a copy of something--a cell, an organism, a fragment of DNA.

But to most people, it had come to mean growing a single cell from a person into a whole new copy of that person, akin to the vision of “The Boys From Brazil.” Adding to the alarm at this type of cloning, two teams received wide attention in the last year for vowing to create cloned children. One group is led by an obscure religious leader who says scientists from another planet told him to start cloning.

Most disease researchers and patient advocates say they have no interest in creating children through cloning. Instead, they are looking for ways to take a cell from a patient’s skin or cheek and transform it into stem cells that might be fashioned into cures for disease. To accomplish this, the skin or cheek cell would be merged with an egg cell to create an embryo, which would be dissected at 5 days of age for its stem cells.

Changes in Terminology

This technique is often called therapeutic cloning, but many advocates did not want to use the word “cloning” at all. Adopting language from scientists, they began calling the technique “somatic cell nuclear transfer,” “nuclear transplantation” or “regenerative medicine.”

In time, some lawmakers began to insist that cloning in medical research is not even cloning. “It’s commonly referred to as therapeutic cloning, and that’s a misnomer,” said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) at a May hearing. “It isn’t cloning at all.”

“There is great misunderstanding in the use of the word ‘cloning,’ ” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) last week. “I use ‘stem cell research’ or ‘nuclear transplantation.’ ”

Another problematic term was “embryo,” a word that was particularly troubling for antiabortion lawmakers. Because they opposed a woman’s right to destroy an embryo during pregnancy, they faced a hurdle in arguing that scientists should be free to destroy embryos for their stem cells.

In time, some lawmakers began to argue that an embryo created through cloning is substantially different from one made through the traditional merger of egg and sperm.

“I would argue that an embryo has not been created” during the cloning process, said former Sen. Connie Mack (R-Fla.), an abortion opponent whose experience with cancer led him to support research cloning. “You’re using an egg that has never been fertilized by sperm and is never placed in a uterus. The words that we’re using were defined in a former age.”

To cloning opponents, these shifts in language were a kind of sleight of hand, meant to downplay the idea that cloning destroys a human embryo. “They’re linguistic cloaking devices,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.

At the same time, cloning opponents were working to paint their own portrait of the technique. They said cloning would lead to “human embryo farms,” in which human lives would be sacrificed for their body parts. President Bush adopted some of the same unsettling language in a White House speech April 10 that urged the Senate to ban all cloning.

Despite this dark view of cloning, nearly 60 senators support the idea of preserving the technique in medical research while banning it as a method of reproduction, Daschle said last week. A measure to ban all cloning, sponsored by Sens. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.), has support from 42 senators, said Michelle Powers, an anti-cloning activist.

Getting the Message Out

Why did lawmakers choose one view over the other? People on both sides of the issue agree that advocates of therapeutic cloning managed to make more senators feel comfortable about the technique, even if some constituents remained uneasy with it.

Working with patients around the country, therapeutic cloning advocates placed more than 30 opinion pieces in newspapers. And celebrities such as Muhammad Ali and actors Michael J. Fox and Christopher Reeve testified against a total cloning ban. Forty Nobel Prize-winning scientists signed a letter in support of the research, and former President Ford wrote his own letter.

“Their side has done a better job” of getting its message out, “and especially of lining up big names. They have names that the public recognizes and respects,” Prentice acknowledged.

A group of Hollywood producers helped sway Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), whose credentials as a conservative and abortion opponent made it easier for other antiabortion lawmakers to sign on. The group, CuresNow, was founded by Jerry Zucker, whose directing credits include “Airplane!” and “Ghost”; his wife, Janet, a movie producer; Douglas Wick, producer of “Gladiator”; and his wife, Lucy Fisher, former vice chairman of Sony Pictures. Both couples have children with juvenile diabetes.

When the group, CuresNow, agreed to pay for a pro-research ad on television, in Utah and elsewhere, it assured Hatch that “there were therapeutic cloning groups willing to aggressively counter the concerns of his pro-life constituency,” said a Democratic Senate aide. “This raised his comfort level.”

Some senators who were skeptical of therapeutic cloning only months ago eventually became its champions.

Daschle last year had said he was “uncomfortable with even cloning for research purposes,” but this year he engineered parliamentary maneuvers that have forced Brownback to retreat from a total cloning ban.

Explaining his change of heart, Daschle said last week: “What I didn’t fully appreciate initially was the tremendous opportunities scientifically there are with the pursuit of therapeutic cloning....And many of us have come to the conclusion we should not only provide that opportunity, we should be encouraging it with additional research dollars.”

Daschle, who controls the Senate calendar, offered Brownback time last week for a debate and vote on cloning, but under terms that Brownback said would make it hard to get the 60 votes needed to win. Brownback is now considering his options, including whether to propose a two-year moratorium on cloning, rather than a total ban, in an effort to win more votes.

It is unclear whether the Senate will vote on a separate measure, sponsored by Hatch, Feinstein and others, that would bar cloning as a way to produce children but preserve it as a legal technique of medical research.