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Anti-cloning group launches effort to overturn Missouri amendment By KIT WAGAR The Kansas City Star JEFFERSON CITY | The bell for round 2 in Missouri's brawl over stem cell research just rang. A fledgling political group calling itself "Cures without Cloning" launched an initiative campaign Wednesday morning designed to overturn the key provision of last year's Amendment 2. Amendment 2, approved by 51 percent of voters, protects all stem cell research permitted by federal law. The new effort seeks to ban any cutting-edge research that involves the cloning of human cells. The group's chairwoman, Lori Buffa, said the initiative was designed to impose a true ban on "human cloning" and clear up confusing language in last year's amendment. It also would prohibit the use of taxpayer funds on any research involving cloned cells. Buffa, a St. Peters pediatrician, repeated the claim often made by Amendment 2 opponents that voters did not understand what they were voting on. "The wording of this initiative is simple and clear," Buffa said. "We are ensuring access to cures but adopting a genuine ban on human cloning." Buffa made her comments at a news conference outside the Secretary of State's office. She was interrupted at one point by Dan Rice, a retired business manager who was on his way into the state library. "Do we always have to be a backward state?" Rice asked. Rice, who worked on last year's campaign to pass Amendment 2, said later that he had grown weary of opponents claiming that voters didn't know what they were doing even after an extensive campaign. He said the research Buffa wants to ban could lead to cures for diabetes, heart disease and other diseases. "Wouldn't it be great not to have your chest cut open and instead you could take your own cell and create cures out of it?" Rice said. "Voters in Missouri knew what they were doing." Buffa said she expected to work with many of the groups who opposed Amendment 2 last year, including the Catholic Church, some conservative evangelical churches and the advocacy group, Missourians Against Human Cloning. At the moment, however, she said she was the only member of a "broad-based, statewide coalition" seeking to overturn Amendment 2. Buffa said the group's name was intended to convey the belief that cures can be found through traditional techniques rather than through cloning techniques. She refused to say whether she also opposed research involving stem cells taken from fertilized eggs left over from in vitro fertilization treatments. The name also mimics the name of the group that sponsored Amendment 2, the Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures. The new initiative is designed to stop research technique used to grow early stem cells in the laboratory. Buffa said the technique creates a microscopic human life and is both dangerous and unnecessary. The process - known as somatic cell nuclear transfer - takes the nucleus of a patient and drops it into a human egg cell that has had its nucleus removed. The egg reprograms the nucleus to act like a fertilized egg and grow into a ball of cells with stem cells inside. Scientists hope to learn how to tell those stem cells to grow into specific body cells to treat diabetes, Parkinson's disease and a host of degenerative conditions. Amendment 2 already bans attempts to create a human baby by making it a felony to implant cloned cells into a woman's uterus. But Buffa said a cloned human life is created the moment that the nucleus with a full complement of human DNA is inserted into the egg. "The vast majority of Missourians support a ban on cloning," Buffa said. "We're clarifying that human cloning is somatic cell nuclear transfer, even though it doesn't create a baby." Rice said the process no more creates a human than a blood transfusion or a kidney transplant. "There's only one thing that creates a human," Rice said. "Something in a Petri dish is not a human being." Rayilyn Brown Board Member AZNPF Arizona Chapter National Parkinson's Foundation [log in to unmask] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn