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LOUISIANA: Senate Votes For Cloning Ban Wednesday, May 26, 2004 BATON ROUGE (AP) -- A week after voting to allow cloning of human cells for therapeutic stem cell research, the state Senate approved a second bill to ban the practice. Tuesday night's vote provided a new wrinkle in one of the hardest fought battles of the current legislative session and means the House now has two measure before it dealing with the issue: Sen. Art Lentini's bill banning all cloning of human cells, and Senate president Don Hines' less restrictive measure that bans cloning only if it is for the purpose of reproducing a human being. Hines, D-Bunkie, who is a physician, will take his bill before a House committee on Wednesday. Lentini's measure will be scheduled for a House committee hearing in the coming days. For the second time in a week the Senate found itself in prolonged debate over complex issues of what constitutes human life and the value of stem-cell research for development of cures for diabetes, neuromuscular diseases, Alzheimer's disease and other maladies. Lentini's backers said a single cloned embryonic cell is human life and should be protected as such. Using it for development and harvesting of stem cells results in its destruction, they noted. ''To sacrifice the life of one human being to save the life of another -- we have never permitted that and we should never permit it,'' Lentini, R-Kenner, said. Lentini's opponents largely centered there arguments on two issues: that the cloned embryonic cell cannot develop into a human being unless it is implanted in a womb, and that the cloned cell is not created by the union of sperm and egg. ''It does make a difference from my vantage point that there is no father,'' said Sen. Jay Dardenne, R-Baton Rouge. Centering on complex issues of science and morality, the debate, which has been raging for weeks at the Legislature, mirrors one going on in other states and in Congress. It involves the cloning of a human by placing a donor's genetic material, often taken from the skin, into a human egg cell from which genetic material has been removed. The result is a cloned embryo with the genetic material of the skin cell donor. It could supposedly be implanted into a woman's womb and grown into a human being or used to develop and harvest stem cells that could be used to treat any of the donor's genetic maladies without risk of rejection by the body. Committee hearings on the issue have placed Roman Catholic Church officials and conservative religious leaders and their backers in the medical, legal and scientific communities against parents of children with diabetes, victims of Parkinson's disease (including some clergy) and numerous medical researchers and physicians. Backers of Lentini's bill argue that stem cells taken from fully developed human beings -- from placenta, blood, even fat -- holds more promise than embryonic stem cell research. Hines' supporters say embryonic stem-cell research holds more promise, in part because therapies could be developed using a disease victim's own cloned cells, thereby eliminating the need for immunity-suppressing drugs to fight rejection. In February, South Korean researchers announced that they had become the first in the world to successfully clone a human embryo, and then collect from it master stem cells in a process that might eventually let patients grow their own replacement tissues. The key vote Tuesday night was on an amendment Hines tried to add to Lentini's measure that would have had the effect of allowing cloning for stem-cell research. It would define human cloning as being ''for the sole purpose of implanting the resulting product to initiate pregnancy that could result in the birth of a human being.'' ''We have made this an issue into what I call the far right and the far left...Some of us have to find our way into the middle,'' Sen. Robert Adley, D-Benton, said in support of Hines' amendment. But with 37 of 39 senators present and voting, the amendment died on a 17-19 vote. The Senate then voted 29-8 for Lentini's bill. If recent history is any indication, the votes in the House will be close. Rep. Gary Beard, R-Baton Rouge, has a bill similar to Lentini's measure. It was approved after an emotional hearing before the House Criminal Justice Committee on a 5-4 vote but Beard pulled it off the House floor after it was amended 55-42 to make it more like Hines' bill. Hines' bill is scheduled for a Criminal Justice Committee hearing on Wednesday. SOURCE: Associated Press / The Sulphur Southwest Daily News, LA http://www.sulphurdailynews.com/articles/2004/05/26/news/news1.txt * * * ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn