Banning Human Cloning--Then What?

The public wonder and concern that accompanied the birth of Dolly, the cloned sheep, four years ago died down soon after her arrival. Little has been heard about human reproductive cloning since then in the public square. This silence was pierced recently when two groups each announced its intention to clone a child from a human being within the next few years.

The Raelians, a religious organization, disclosed in October 2000 that they had found a grieving American couple willing to pay $500,000 to clone their deceased child and that they would proceed with cloning in a secret laboratory within the United States. A few months later, an international consortium led by Pavos Zavos, Ph.D., a University of Kentucky emeritus professor of biology, and Severino Antinori, M.D., an Italian infertility specialist, declared that it intended to clone the first human within two years at an undisclosed location outside the United States. These announcements led Representative James Greenwood (R-PA), chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, to convene a hearing on human cloning on 28 March 2001.

Why did human reproductive cloning suddenly become of concern to the House of Representatives? What will the federal government do with regard to the development of human cloning at this point in time? And what should it do to address human cloning in the long-term? I will briefly highlight the major controversies that surfaced at the hearing and then consider the broader questions.

Scientific Controversies

The initial question of concern to the House subcommittee members was whether cloning science has now reached the point of application to humans. Scientists at the hearing offered widely diverging views about this. Zavos testified that only a small number of cloned animals has died after birth and declared that the key to avoiding impaired human clones is to engage in prenatal screening. Consequently, it is now safe to undertake human cloning, he maintained. He was supported in this view by Brigitte Boisselier, Ph.D., visiting assistant professor of chemistry at Hamilton College and scientific director of the Raelians, who argued that human cloning would not give rise to the problems that have been encountered in nonhuman mammalian cloning.

However, professor of veterinary medicine Mark Westhusin, Ph.D., of Texas A&M University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Rudolf Jaenisch, Ph.D., maintained that the same sorts of problems that have appeared in nonhuman mammalian cloning would reappear in human cloning. Westhusin stated that mammals have incurred serious defects leading to spontaneous abortion and that mammalian newborns often display severe respiratory and circulatory problems. The most likely explanation for such abnormalities, Jaenisch hypothesized, is that in cloning, the genetic reprogramming that governs the way an organism develops must take place in a much shorter period of time than in coital or in vitro reproduction. This may result in faulty reprogramming leading to dysregulation of gene expression and consequent genetic defects in cloned animals. There is good reason to think that this also would occur in human cloning, Jaenisch maintained. Until reproductive cloning research has been carried out on several generations of primates and is better understood, he argued, human cloning should not be attempted. Even then, several generations of descendants of human clones would have to be observed before scientists could be sure that it would not have a destructive impact on humans. This process could take as long as a century.

Ethical Controversy

Bioethicists who testified focused on those aspects of the ethical controversy surrounding human cloning that are of particular interest to public policy makers. Thomas Murray, Ph.D., President of The Hastings Center and a member of NBAC, maintained that human cloning is still unsafe, as NBAC had predicted, and that, if carried out, would leave in its wake "damaged women, many dead fetuses, and children born with serious impairments." He expressed particular concern that couples suffering...