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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. * Send e-mail to [log in to unmask] SOURCE: The Philadelphia Daily News http://dailynews.philly.com/content/daily_news/2001/11/28/local/JILL28C.htm * * * ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn