Averting a Catastrophe

" 'Human beings should not be cloned to stock a medical junkyard of spare parts for medical experimentation,' said House majority whip Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas. Cloning, even for research purposes alone, is 'no better than medical strip mining. The preservation of life is what's being lost here,' DeLay said on the House floor."

August 1 Boston Globe

"The chronically ill, desperate for help, are easy marks for grand promises of imminent cure. In earlier times, many a quack or preacher took advantage of their gullibility. Today they still are being exploited, only the cures are being promised by biotech entrepreneurs. The latest panacea is a fiction called 'therapeutic cloning,' now being peddled in Congress to sabotage an urgently needed legislative ban on cloning human beings."

Ethicist Leon Kass, July 31 Chicago Tribune

As well as anyone and better than most, pro-lifers appreciate that victory most often consists of staving off the initiatives of those who have placed their consciences in deep freeze. While there are any number of battles yet to fight in this particular war, when the House of Representatives withstood pressure to adopt what columnist Charles Krauthammer rightly described as a "nightmare and an abomination," the absurdly mislabeled "Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001," sponsored by James Greenwood (R-Pa.), the good guys prevailed. (See story, page one.)

The biotechnology industry's dream-come-true, Greenwood's bill--rejected 249-178--would have allowed human embryos to be created by cloning for research but with the strict proviso that they could not be implanted. This would mean that it would be legal to create human life by cloning but illegal to allow that same human embryo to live--a.k.a. "clone and kill."

Instead the House strongly backed the "Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001," sponsored by Rep. Dave Weldon, M.D. (R-Fl.), and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mi.), 265-162. The measure flat-out prohibits the creation of human embryos by cloning. The bi-partisan coalition included 200 Republicans who were joined by 63 Democrats and two independents.

Listening to the discussion and following how the House debate was covered in the media, you quickly learn two things. First, their language (as columnist Paul Greenberg said of Bill Clinton) is "as flexible as a forger's handwriting." Second, most of the media and almost the entire public are on opposite ends of the spectrum on this one.

How can I say the public is in our corner? In June an International Communications Research poll asked adult Americans this question: "Should scientists be allowed to use human cloning to create a supply of human embryos to be destroyed in medical research?" An overwhelming majority--86%--said no.

But supporters in the House and many media outlets treated plans to custom-tailor the creation of human embryos purely for destruction as if it were ethically a ho-hum issue. We were chastened, informed that only "flat earth" types could possibly oppose this leap into an ethical abyss.

Consider: A moment ago the party line was that the question was whether to harvest the stem cells of "spare" embryos who are "left over" at infertility clinics. Since these stem cells constitute a virtual Aladdin's lamp (as one enraptured science reporter gushingly put it), and since the embryos are going to "die anyway," why not get some "good" out of their deaths?

But even as that debate continued, like some sort of a modern-day Columbus, proponents moved on in search of a Brave New World. In Krauthammer's words, Rep Greenwood's bill "sanctions, licenses and protects the launching of the most ghoulish and dangerous enterprise in modern scientific history: the creation of nascent cloned human life for the sole purpose of its exploitation and destruction."

What did I miss? How did we approach the deep end so fast? Because proponents rode the back of the argument that cloning overcomes the problem of rejection by the "host." How?

Putting it in first-person terms, the idea (as Leon Kass explains) is to harvest an unfertilized ovum from a woman and remove the nucleus. The nucleus from one of my adult cells is inserted as a replacement. An embryo clone is then grown, the embryo's stem cells removed, and, in theory, programmed to produce whatever it is (say, heart muscle cells) that I need.

But questions of ethics aside, this is abysmal science. As Kass points out, "Before one starts arguing the morality of embryo farming, we should know that the whole matter is science fiction. The egg containing my nucleus is not fully my genetic twin. It also contains residual DNA--mitochondrial DNA--from the woman who donated the egg. The cloned embryo and all cells derived from it remain partly 'foreign,' enough to cause transplant rejection. The transplantation-rejection problem that is supposedly solvable only by cloning cannot be solved by cloning--except in the unusual case where a (pre-menopausal) female patient donates both nucleus and egg. (Even without this problem, the whole idea is preposterous: where would we get enough eggs to provide each of us with our own embryonic twin for strip mining?)"

For now we stopped one awful anti-life initiative. Say a prayer of thanks but respond to the alert on page 20 and be sure to purchase multiple copies of the embryonic stem cell flyer on page 11.

dave andrusko can be reached at dha1245@juno.com