Posted on 12/06/2001 5:00:40 PM PST by JIM O
December 05, 2001
Cloning to save lives, not to create them
For centuries, the birth of modern scientific medicine was stalled by an ethical dilemma. The secrets to what made people live and die were waiting to be discovered, but the Roman Catholic Church considered the mutilation of a corpse, even in the interest of medical discovery, to be a grave sin.
The ethicists of the time may even have argued that autopsies would constitute a step onto some kind of slippery slope. It did. Those who took that step, first in secret, then in defiance of church edicts, slipped right out of the Dark Ages and into a study of the human body that has delivered benefits impossible to calculate.
Have the scientists at Worcester-based Advanced Cell Technology stepped on to a similarly slippery slope? Perhaps, but it appears that, like earlier medical advances, this one is more likely to result in lives saved than virtue lost.
Medical researchers draw a critical distinction between " reproductive cloning " - creating an embryo with the intent of growing it into a human - and " therapeutic cloning, " a method of producing the stem cells which offer such promise for curing a wide range of diseases. The formulation, by President George W. Bush and other critics, that therapeutic cloning is a way to " grow life to destroy it " may be true in theory. In practice, the product of ACT’s experiments is a clump of cells invisible to the naked eye, a speck of chemicals manufactured to make medicine, not people.
In the midst of last summer’s stem cell debate, the House acted too quickly to prohibit all human cloning experiments. The Senate, in turn, has acted too slowly, promising to take up the legislation in January. Announcing his company’s experiment, ACT president Michael West turned the ethics argument against Washington’s delays. Given the number of people dying while the ethical debate stalls progress, he said, it is " unethical to sit around and wait until Congress decided to debate the issues. "
That debate should proceed, but there is no single institution today that can bottle up science like the Catholic Church did in the Middle Ages. Attempts to stop cloning research go against two of the strongest forces in human nature: curiosity and greed. Scientists live to discover; drug companies exist to make money.
The " what if " cloning scenarios that have fed science fiction for decades may grow closer to reality. ACT, like other mainstream research firms, denies any interest in reproductive cloning. But others have vowed to be the first to grow a clone into a human. The betting here is that reproductive cloning will not become widespread. There’s no shortage of human babies, and they are far less expensive - and more fun - to produce by conventional methods used in the privacy of the home.
The market for medical treatments based on stem cells, on the other hand, is enormous. Researchers say treatments for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and a host of other diseases await a sufficient supply of stem cells. Research banned by Congress will simply move overseas. Instead, it should be allowed to continue, here in Massachusetts as in other places friendly to both science and ethics, guided by a consensus that differentiates between therapeutic and reproductive cloning.
A spark of enlightenment brightened the Dark Ages when people recognized that while mutilating a corpse in pursuit of warped pleasure is repugnant, dissecting a cadaver in the name of life-saving medicine is virtuous. A similar distinction would illuminate the debate over cloning.
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