Wed. November 28, 2001
Philadelphia Daily News
Jill Porter 
Process is not about growing humans

REGULATION AND OVERSIGHT ARE PREFERABLE
TO A COMPLETE BAN

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa says "therapeutic cloning" is not
cloing at all, and wants full debate in the Senate. I THINK OF IT
as the Dark Ages Dance.

Six cells multiply in a Massachusetts laboratory, and right wings
flap and knees jerk all over the country.

The announcement that scientists at a private biotechnical
company had cloned a human embryo immediately unleashed
rhetoric heated in the beaker of hysteria.

"We are on the verge of having human embryo farms in
laboratories all across America," U.S. Rep. Christopher H. Smith
of New Jersey grimly pronounced in words remarkably similar -
which is to say identical - to those words used by an official
of the National Right to Life Committee.

And so the debate over cloning threatens to be abducted by
anti-abortion ideologues and distorted by attempts to portray
the scientists involved as ruthless money-grubbing ghouls
who want to manufacture human beings to harvest their
spare parts.

t's a typical, if tiresome, reaction to crossing new scientific
thresholds - or as an historian who called into a National Public
Radio show put it, "an issue of modernity versus non-modernity."

Advanced Cell Technology, of Worcester, Mass., is attempting
to create embryos so that stem cells can be extracted and used to
grow replacement tissue to repair damaged heart cells, spinal
nerves and the like. The potential for treatment of chronic and
terminal diseases, ranging from diabetes to Parkinson's to heart
disease to Alzheimer's, could be limitless.

The company doesn't intend to clone an embryo that can be
implanted into a womb and grow into a person; its only interest
is in producing clones for this therapeutic use.

And we're not talking a formed fetus that pro-lifers can throw
on a poster to inflame discussion. In therapeutic cloning research,
stem cells are extracted when the embryo reaches blastocyst stage,
about 100 cells, at which point it's the size of a pinhead.

t's really a pre-embryo with no human characteristics, a speck
of undifferentiated cells. And whatever "moral" arguments
can be made in its defense are overshadowed by the moral
arguments in favor of using it to potentially save the lives of
children and adults.

is there potential for abuse? For some megalomaniacal scientist
to attempt to duplicate humans on the laboratory assembly line,
like something out of a Robin Cook novel?

I suppose there could be, when the research advances to that
stage - especially if the government attempts to shut down
such legitimate research, leaving it to unethical underground
laboratories and renegade scientists to continue their work
unmonitored.

Because anyone who thinks the future of science can be held
in abeyance by legislative fiat is a victim of wishful thinking.

And the potential for abuse is no reason to justify a ban.
Think narcotics, for example.

It's true that illegal drug addiction is an intractable social problem
that has created other intractable social problems.

But that's no reason to disavow the legitimate use of narcotics
in hospitals and hospices so that the sick and dying can gain
respite from unbearable pain, so that surgeons can operate
on ailing patients and save their lives.

Britain permitted therapeutic cloning research until very recently,
and hasn't tumbled down the "slippery slope" towards unethical
people-production that cloning opponents conjure.

"There has been no apparent ill effect of this permission on
British society," said Ronald Green, director of the Ethics Institute
at Dartmouth College, who chaired the ethics advisory board of
Advanced Cell Technology.

The U.S. House of Representatives has already passed a law
banning cloning.

Let's hope the U.S. Senate will do the wise thing - allow
therapeutic cloning research to continue with regulation and
oversight - rather than join in the Dark Ages Dance. *

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SOURCE: The Philadelphia Daily News
http://dailynews.philly.com/content/daily_news/2001/11/28/local/JILL28C.htm

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