Senate Torn Over Cloning
His 13-year-old daughter at his side, Hollywood director Jerry Zucker lamented the fact that Congress might pass a law “stopping us from trying to save my daughter’s life.”
Across Capitol Hill, Douglas Johnson, the spokesman for a leading anti-abortion group, warned that the cure Zucker seeks for his daughter, Katie, who has juvenile diabetes, would lead to “human embryo farms.”
And so it went Tuesday, as the Senate moved closer to a vote on whether to ban human cloning. In dueling news conferences and a Senate hearing, lawmakers heard emotional debate about how comprehensive a ban should be.
There is broad support in Congress for outlawing cloning as a way to produce children. But some scientists and patients, including actor Christopher Reeve, pleaded Tuesday to exempt researchers from a ban so that they can use cloning as part of research into cures for disease or disability.
The House voted last year to bar cloning for any purpose, including research, and President Bush praised that action. A Senate vote is expected within weeks.
“Right now, the balance in the Senate is very, very much in doubt,” said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who supports cloning for disease research, sometimes called therapeutic cloning.
The vision for this type of cloning, which at best is years away from reality, is to clone a patient and dissect the resulting embryo at about five days for its stem cells. The stem cells, in turn, would be grown into new heart, brain or insulin-producing cells--whatever that patient needs.
Made this way, the cells would match the patient’s genetic makeup and would presumably be readily incorporated into the patient’s body. By contrast, transplants are currently hampered by tissue rejection, in which the patient’s body treats new tissue as foreign material to be expelled.
But starkly different views of the ethics for this type of cloning--and its prospects of success--emerged at the hearings Tuesday.
Some opponents said that therapeutic cloning is over-hyped and unethical, because it turns human life into a commodity. “Creating life simply for the purpose of destroying it is immoral, unethical and should be illegal,” Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “The human body is not a product to be mass produced and stripped for parts.”
Opponents also said that improved cloning techniques would inevitably lead doctors to offer “designer babies,” with specific traits selected by parents. “The parent becomes the architect; the child becomes the ultimate shopping experience,” said Jeremy Rifkin, a noted technology critic and liberal, at a news conference.
Yet others predicted that a large demand would develop for human eggs, which are required in cloning. Poor women might try to make money by repeatedly donating their eggs, even though “adequate long-term safety data” on donations is lacking, said Judy Norsigian, executive director of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, author of the book “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”
Supporters of the research say that a 5-day-old embryo is not equivalent to a human being. They argued Tuesday that, with adequate regulation, no embryo would leave the laboratory or be implanted in a woman’s womb to produce a child.
Cloning might “relieve the suffering of millions,” said Reeve, whose 1995 horseback-riding accident left him paralyzed from the shoulders down and unable to breathe without a ventilator.
Barring the research, Reeve told the Senate panel, would be “condemning a lot of people to unnecessary suffering and death.”
There is some chance that the Senate will fail to pass any measure. Johnson, of the National Right to Life Committee, said that no law is preferable to a law that permits therapeutic cloning.
A therapeutic cloning law, he said, would allow the creation of cloned embryos and then mandate their destruction, since bringing those embryos to term would be illegal.
Zucker and several other Hollywood figures recently formed a group to promote stem cell research and other related technologies. Some members were in Washington to lobby senators.
The new National Stem Cell Research Coalition includes Zucker, his wife, Janet, and producer Doug Wick and his wife, Lucy Fisher, the former vice chairman of Sony Pictures. Like the Zuckers, Wick and Fisher have a daughter with diabetes.
Wick said the group was created about a month ago and had raised $600,000.
