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