This is a excerpt (yes, excerpt, it was longer!) of one of the newsletters from registering with humancloning.org.
WHY CAN ONLY EXISTING LINES OF STEM CELLS BE USED?
by Linda Rader
When Dolly hit the news, some conservatives were afraid of the
idea of cloning people. Those people didn’t have the political
support to get legislation passed in Congress, but they had the
power to lobby President Clinton to do something. What the
president did was to send out a memo that no federal funds should
be used in research on human cloning.
At this time Paula Jones had filed suit against Clinton for
sexual harassment and Clinton didn’t need another reason for
conservatives to vend their ire at him.
Clinton’s moratorium on federal funding for human cloning only
meant that people who apply for federal grants, which means
university professors and students, couldn’t get money if their
research included human cloning.
However that didn’t prevent the private sector from funding the
research and why should that matter? Well, because of the big
stink over the Human Genome Project. Remember that?
When supercomputers were invented, several biologists realized
that they had enough computing power to finally make it possible
to sequence, i.e. read, all the genes in the human body. Wouldn’t
it be a great idea if we made this a national goal, like the
space program? We said we would put a man on the moon in 10 years
and gave thousands of engineers cushy jobs for years while doing
it. So there were conferences and university chancellors and
editorials in science journals etc. about what a great idea it
would be if the federal government funded a Human Genome Project
that would take 10 to 15 years to complete. Congress debated the
funding but eventually gave in.
Then came along another biologist named Craig Venter who says he
can do it cheaper and faster if he just jumps over the junk DNA
and sequences just the genes in DNA. And he starts his own
company, called Celera and announces he’ll sequence the human
Genome in 2 years.
Howls on Capitol Hill! Congress begins to doubt the wisdom giving
tax money to this university lead program, The Human Genome
Project, if private capital is willing to fund the same research.
And what’s this about taking 15 years to do, if Venter proves you
only need 2? So universities had to come up with a story real
fast to explain themselves.
Their argument was that the results of the Human Genome Project
would be free to everyone while Venter would charge other people
to use his information. The final result, however, was that
government felt it was an issue of saving face for them. If they
let Venter beat them then people might say, hey why do we pay
taxes for research at all? Let’s cut that spending and let
private industry do research on their own. People's jobs were at
stake here, not just their reputations! So NIH talked congress
into giving them money for the newest super computers on market
that Venter was using and they adopted Venter’s process and the
race was on. Who would sequence the human genome was a matter not
just of the genome but a referendum on public vs. private
spending. Government vs. capitalism.
That’s why when Venter reached his goal it was the President of
the United States, GWB who called a press conference to announce
the success of human genome sequencing. Both NIH and Craig
Venter’s Celera were invited to the press conference and the
President announced it a tie. Do you think the government would
have announced it a tie if the NIH were clearing in the lead?
Ok, back to cloning. So Clinton puts a moratorium on federal
funding of clones to appease the conservatives during his
domestic troubles. That means for 6 years universities do no
research on cloning. But private industry is going along merrily.
Genotech a private biotech company in San Francisco started up
with the intent of cloning stem cells for therapeutic treatments.
(Geneotech has the patent on telomeres by the way.)
What, oh God forbid, if private industry should be successful in
the human cloning field and university research was made
irrelevant because they couldn’t get funding to do the same
research? What would happen to their prestige, their phony-
baloney jobs, as Mel Brooks would say?
So when Clinton’s moratorium on federal funding for cloning was
about to expire the university network got on the bandwagon
lobbying members of Congress, NIH, etc to advise the president to
lift the ban. But the president wasn’t Clinton any more but
George W. Bush. And Bush’s heavy support comes from the
conservative religious right.
The religious right has been opposed to abortion since day one.
And when invitro fertilization became possible 20 years ago, they
were right in the middle of the abortion debate. The religious
right opposed IVF or test tube babies because it was manipulating
human eggs outside the womb. If you can take eggs out for IVF, it
might lead you to believe there's no big deal about abortion
during the first 4 weeks also. So the religious right opposes egg
harvesting. It also opposes fertilizing, manipulating or
implanting embryos that result in pregnancy. It opposes storing
frozen embryos and it opposes destroying them. They just want the
fertilization business to go away.
Human reproductive cloning would necessarily have to start in a
lab and who knew how to insert an embryo in a woman today? Why
fertility clinics which have been doing IVF for 20 years!
The religious right was pressing Bush to ban all federal funds
for human cloning, and they were lobbying Congress for a law
making human cloning in the private sector illegal also.
The religious right did not have the votes to get a cloning ban
passed. They tried before and failed. However they did have the
clout to get Bush to renew the moratorium on federal funds to
universities. They could stop government cloning if not private
cloning.
So the university researchers stuck a deal. They offered to
support a ban on Reproductive Cloning in exchange for federal
funds for Therapeutic Cloning.
A ban on cloning could not pass the House just on conservative
votes. But if liberals joined the conservatives it could pass.
Universities promised to urge their friends in the Democratic
Party to support the House bill if Bush would allow grants to
universities to do human cloning research.
The House bill went into committee. One month later, Rudolph
Janeanich of MIT, the guy who had first cloned mice, came out
saying for the first time, "Hey we just suddenly realized that
the animals we cloned have a high rate of defects. We think it
might be because of cloning. We think it is irresponsible to
clone people for babies. We support a House ban on reproductive
cloning."
9 days later, lo and behold, George W. Bush signs a new memo
about federal funds. He okays federal funds for universities to
fund research into human cloning. In effect, he was saying, you
guys won’t fall behind the private sector in this research.
However, I’ve got to appease my religious constituents who don’t
want any more embryos to be destroyed. So here’s the compromise.
You can get funded only if you use cells that came from embryos
that have already have been harvested and exist. Whatever damage
was done has already been done to them. But you won’t get funding
if you use brand new cell lines from new people. No new embryos
can be destroyed. You can only clone the lines that exist as of
this date.
(Linda Rader is a regular contributor, especially in the forum of
HCF. Read her rational answers to sometimes irrational questions
from posters curious about human cloning. Go to our lively forum.
-JPL)
ping to my post 4
I know you saw this thread; but the looney rant in post 4 does explain what they want to do with cloning. That should answer some of your questions.