FROM: Buffalo News
 Monday, March 10, 2003

" A cloning ban
Senate shouldn't repeat the House's legislative mistake

 Too much politics and too little science went into the comprehensive ban
on human cloning passed late last month by the House of Representatives.
It now may be up to the Senate to make sure the door isn't slammed on
promising medical research.
It can do so by drawing a clear line between reproductive cloning that
seeks to replicate human beings and therapeutic cloning that seeks to
replicate specific types of human tissue. Reproductive cloning should be
banned, but therapeutic cloning offers the potential of medical advances
that could enhance life, not abuse it.

There always has been widespread support for a ban on reproductive
cloning, an issue that gained momentum last year when researchers linked
to a fringe sect announced they had successfully cloned a human baby.
That claimed medical "first" remains undocumented and suspect, but the
publicity fueled attempts to reconsider a legislative cloning ban that
passed the House in 2001 but died a procedural death in the Senate.

By a 241-155 vote on Feb. 27, the House passed a comprehensive cloning
ban favored by the White House and sponsored by Reps. Bart Stupak,
D-Mich., and David Weldon, R-Fla. The measure now goes to a Senate
committee, although there are doubts whether it will make it to a floor
debate, let alone passage, this year.

The Weldon-Stupak bill not only bans human cloning in this country -
under penalty of a $1 million fine and imprisonment up to 10 years - but
also forbids importation of cloned embryos or any product derived from
one.

That last measure is particularly troubling, because it would mean
cloning-derived cures developed outside the United States would not be
available to American patients. If cures can be developed anywhere for
diseases - juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's are
early potential targets - there can be no good ethical grounds for
withholding them from sufferers whose lives could be dramatically
improved. The idea of such a thing is akin to punishments meted out for
scientists who taught that the earth revolves around the sun, and not
vice versa.

But lawmakers have even deeper issues to consider. The House provisions
against therapeutic cloning ban a procedure in which the nucleus of an
adult tissue cell is used to replace the nucleus of a human egg cell and
then manipulated into multiplying. Somatic cell nuclear transfer leads to
an embryo with stem cells that can evolve into selected types of tissue
that might then be used for research or implants.

Abortion foes define the embryo as human life and its demise in
experimentation as murder. But research proponents question whether
undifferentiated embryonic cells, with no central nervous system and no
chance of developing into a human, deserve that definition - especially
in a debate in which politics and religion play a bigger role than
science.

Weldon, a physician as well as a politician, argues that there is no
scientific evidence so far that therapeutic cloning can lead to cures,
and that cloning should be more of an ethical question than a scientific
one. Anything less, he fears, offers a "slippery slope" future that would
lead to reproductive cloning or genetic manipulation.

Until properly limited and regulated stem cell research proves a failure,
though, the possibility of cures is a compelling argument, and ignoring
that life-saving or life-enhancing path is the greater sin. The House
turned its collective back on that possibility by defeating an amendment
by Rep. James Greenwood, R-Pa., that would have outlawed reproductive
cloning but allowed regulated therapeutic cloning for medical research.
The Senate should take up that challenge. "

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