First Test of the Biotech Age: Human Cloning
The prospect of a Brave New World creates strange new bedfellows, including us, a hawkish Reagan Republican and a dovish left intellectual and activist. But the issues of the biotech age invite all of us to think anew.
Issue No. 1: human cloning, to be debated in the U.S. Senate in the next few weeks. Will we be content to frame the discussion in the old terms of religion versus science or “pro-life” versus “pro-choice”? Or are we willing to see that the debate is over two distinct views of human life and the good society?
On one side are the utilitarians, who range from libertarians on the right to biotech companies in the center to nonjudgmental liberals on the left. These advocates of cloning see life in terms of markets, patents and progress; individual autonomy, profits and personal choice.
On the other side are those who believe in the intrinsic value of human life. Some are religious and moral conservatives, others economic and ecological progressives. But all share a respect for the human and the natural and oppose efforts to reduce human life and its various parts and stages to the status of mere research tools and manufactured products.
The utilitarians want to proceed with the production of embryonic human clones to be used for experiments and then destroyed. They argue that the potential medical advances of harvesting stem cells from cloned human embryos for medical research justify going ahead.
Those of us who hold to the intrinsic value of life--whatever we may think about a woman’s right to have an abortion--believe that creating embryonic clones for research and eventually for the creation of spare body parts is unethical. However, we strongly support continued research on adult stem cells, which has proved promising in recent clinical trials.
Legislation sponsored by Sens. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.), almost identical to what passed the House last year 265 to 162, would ban all human cloning, including the creation of cloned human embryos for medical experiments--so-called therapeutic cloning.
By contrast, bills introduced by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) would ban only “reproductive cloning”--the implantation of cloned embryos with the intent of initiating a pregnancy. In fact, the widespread practice of “therapeutic” cloning, which would be allowed in the Feinstein and Harkin bills, would make a ban on reproductive cloning virtually unenforceable because there would be so many cloned embryos available. These bills would, in effect, authorize the creation of human clones and then mandate their destruction.
If using a 12-day-old cloned embryo for producing cells and tissues is morally acceptable, what about harvesting more developed cells from, say, an 8-week-old embryo? Or harvesting organs from a 5-month-old cloned fetus, if it were found to be a more useful medical therapy?
What’s more, creating cloned embryos for research would require donated eggs. This is a dangerous procedure, which could lead to the exploitation of young and poor women, who might be wrongfully seduced by offers of payment for their eggs.
Most important, cloning of a human raises fundamental questions that go to the very nature of what it means to be human.
Humans have always thought of the birth of their children as a gift bestowed by God or a beneficent nature. In its place, the new cloned progeny would become the ultimate shopping experience, designed in advance, produced to specification and purchased in the biological marketplace. A child would no longer be a unique creation but rather an engineered reproduction.
Human cloning opens the door to a commercial eugenics civilization. Life science companies already have patented both human embryos and stem cells, giving them ownership and control of a new form of reproductive commerce with frightening implications for the future of society.
As the Senate prepares to debate, we should not be fooled about the stakes. This is the first major test of the biotech age, a moment of decision for a civilization that may have gone too far already in the commercialization and destruction of the human and ecological worlds.
Do we have the wisdom and the political and moral will to say stop?
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William Kristol is editor of the Weekly Standard and co-editor of “The Future Is Now: America Confronts the New Genetics,” due in April from Rowman & Littlefield. Jeremy Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and author of “The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World” (Tarcher Putnam, 1998).
