Cloning Confusion 
Conservatives are once again conflating rogue science and valuable
research. 

By Heidi Pauken
Web Exclusive: 2.10.03 
Print Friendly | Email Article 

It should come as no surprise that cloning foe Sen. Sam Brownback
(R-Kan.) and research advocate Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) used
entirely different terminology when they spoke at news conferences last
Wednesday. Brownback knows he can pack a far stronger punch bellowing
about a "threat to the sanctity of life" than speaking carefully -- as
Feinstein did on Wednesday -- about "nuclear transplantation." In the
coming months, Brownback and his allies will seek a complete ban on
cloning research. And they're going to play word games to get it. 

It's an often-misunderstood aspect of the debate that both parties in
this battle want a ban on reproductive cloning -- the kind that gave us
Dolly the sheep and the rumored Raelian baby, the stuff of evil-octuplet
nightmares. And even though Brownback and his crew -- which includes
President Bush and Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La.) -- would like everyone
to believe that's the whole story, cloning research really falls into
two distinct camps. As of last Wednesday, Feinstein and Sens. Hatch
(R-Utah), Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Arlen Specter (D-Penn.), Tom Harkin
(D-Iowa) and Zell Miller (D-Ga.) have introduced new legislation that
recognizes an important distinction in the cloning debate. Their bill
would ban reproductive cloning outright, place harsh penalties on any
attempt to create carbon-copy babies (up to 10 years in federal prison
plus a $1 million fine) and impose strict regulations on cloning
studies. But it would also clear the way for continuation of the other
arm of cloning research -- therapeutic cloning, which may someday be
used to cure disease. 

If the term "therapeutic cloning" seems foreign to most Americans, it's
because it probably sits on a bulletin board of taboo words somewhere in
the White House. Never mind that this process -- by which scientists
replace the chromosome-containing nucleus of an egg cell with the
nucleus from an adult patient to produce embryonic stem cells that give
rise to all of the human body's 200 cell types and may someday be
implanted to repair tissue damage -- is one of the most promising cures
for Parkinson's disease, Alzheimers, Lou Gehrig's disease and diabetes.
Never mind that lab-mice experiments already indicate the possibility of
such cures. And never mind that some researchers foresee therapeutic
cloning tests on Parkinson's patients beginning by 2009. Conservative
anti-research hard-liners are determined to blur the distinction between
Raelian cloning and therapeutic cloning -- and they would have a
confused American public believe that a bizarre cult leader and an
Alzheimer's patient occupy the same moral plane when it comes to cloning
research. 

True, the President's Council on Bioethics, chaired by anti-cloning cop
Leon Kass, did recognize the distinction between reproductive and
therapeutic cloning, and developed "accurate terminology" to distinguish
the practice of "cloning-to-produce-children" from
"cloning-for-biomedical-research." It's just that the White House and
its allies never use that "accurate terminology" -- and with good
reason. 

The administration and other right-wingers seem to have two major
strategies to glom reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning into one
ugly threat. The first -- exemplified by Bush's State of the Union call
to "set a high standard for humanity and pass a law against all human
cloning" -- is to talk about cloning in such general terms that
Americans associate the entire category of research with the latest
sensational news. Understandably, support for embryonic research wanes
when the public's most visible example is a Raelian clone. 

The Dec. 28 announcement that Raelians -- a sect founded by a Frenchman
who says he boarded a spaceship and learned that human life was created
by aliens -- claimed to have cloned a baby was an immediate setback for
therapeutic cloning proponents. Not coincidentally, just hours after the
announcement, the White House called on the House to develop a
bipartisan bill that would ban all forms of cloning. Brownback joined in
the hoopla at a Jan. 29 science subcommittee hearing. "The threat
presented to us by the Raelians," he explained, "is one that should
refocus our attention on the immediacy of passing a permanent and
comprehensive ban on all human cloning." 

Brownback isn't alone in his fear mongering, and generalizations about
cloning didn't just begin in 2003. In an Aug. 9, 2001, speech, Bush
rallied support for new restrictions on stem-cell lines by comparing
therapeutic cloning to the dystopia of science fiction. "We have arrived
at that brave new world," he said, "that seemed so distant in 1932 when
Aldous Huxley wrote about human beings created in test tubes in what he
called a 'hatchery.'" Bush went on to say that he would approve federal
funding for stem-cell research, but only for embryonic stem-cell lines
in existence at the time, of which he said there were more than 60. Yet
the National Institutes of Health's Web site currently shows that only
nine stem-cell colonies are available to researchers under Bush's
restrictions. Meanwhile, right-wingers continue Bush's strategy of
equating cloning with science fiction in an effort to, for lack of a
better phrase, give Americans the creeps. Sen. Brownback titled his
statement last Wednesday, "The Sanctity of Life in a Brave New World: A
Manifesto on Biotechnology and Human Dignity." 

"Human dignity" is an awfully weighty topic for one such manifesto, and
so is the entire empire of cloning research. As stem-cell biologist Irv
Weissman recently told the LA Weekly, "Cloning has as many meanings to a
scientist as ice to an Eskimo or love to Oprah Winfrey." Unfortunately,
cloning's most vigilant opponents see no need to address the variety
within this science, and the public remains uninformed about the pros
and cons of the technology. Rep. Patrick Toomey (R-Penn.) told reporters
in January, "Most people find the very idea of cloning humans to be very
disturbing . . . and I think they oppose it, regardless of the purpose
for which the cloning was intended." 

But when the public is given nuanced choices on cloning, the politics of
the issue change substantially -- which is exactly what conservatives
are scared of and why they keep trying to confuse and obfuscate at every
turn. Seventy-seven percent of respondents to a 2002 Pew Research Center
Poll said they opposed "the cloning of human beings." But when asked if
they felt that research toward medical cures or protecting human embryos
was a higher priority, they gave priority to research, 47 percent to 39
percent. 

When cloning foes tire of gross generalizations, they like to design
their own "accurate" vocabulary to describe the complicated process of
nuclear transplantation. Because an embryo is destroyed within two weeks
of its creation (when researchers extract the stem cells), some have
spoken of the experiment as "creating life to destroy life," and in the
Jan. 29 subcommittee hearing, Brownback termed it "destructive cloning"
-- not a terribly appealing, or scientific, term. 

Last October, Bush took the notion of embryo-as-life one step further
and modified the Health and Human Services charter to recategorize
embryos and fetuses as "human subjects" that deserve special protection
during scientific experimentation. Abortion-rights politics have always
been a significant component of the cloning debate, and the argument
that life starts with the very first cell has been advanced by many
right-to-lifers. 

Many but not all. The staunchly anti-abortion Hatch has been one of the
Senate's most vocal supporters of therapeutic cloning, and he spoke
eloquently about his reconciliation of the two ideologies in the Jan. 29
hearing. "A critical feature of being pro-life is helping the living,"
he said. "Helping those millions of American families struggling with
the challenges of debilitating diseases is exactly what stem-cell
research [from therapeutic cloning] promises." 

And so it is no surprise that the legislation Hatch introduced along
with Feinstein last Wednesday specifies that embryos used in therapeutic
cloning must be unfertilized -- further discrediting Brownback's
contention that "there is only one type of cloning and, when successful,
always results in the creation of a young human." Utilizing a technology
called somatic cell nuclear transfer, stem cells may be extracted from
an unfertilized egg. These unfertilized embryos would not be implanted
in a womb; nor would they lead to live births. 

Yet Brownback and Landrieu remain determined to enact a broad cloning
ban. With their bill and the measure sponsored by Hatch and Feinstein
perhaps headed for a decisive congressional showdown sometime this
spring, the obfuscation is only likely to increase. If the cloning foes
succeed in overriding reasoned debate with word games, it is the living
who will suffer -- which is why, in the end, this is no game at all. 

Heidi Pauken is an editorial assistant at the Prospect. 

Heidi Pauken

Copyright © 2003 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation:
Heidi Pauken, "Cloning Confusion Conservatives are once again conflating
rogue science and valuable research.," The American Prospect Online,
February 10, 2003. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or
redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written
permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to
[log in to unmask] 

---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.449 / Virus Database: 251 - Release Date: 1/27/2003
 

----------------------------------------------------------------------
To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn