Public funds for cloning breed responsibility

Last week, while the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit was deployed in southern Afghanistan, researchers from Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., announced that they had achieved the first successful cloning of a human embryo. The war against terrorism dominates the headlines and easily overwhelms a cluster of six or seven microscopic cells in a dish. But war is nothing new. Altering the very stuff of human life certainly is. While the science remains in its early stages, it is imperative for society to consider the long-term implications of the cloned embryos before technology leaps too far to be controlled by policy. In light of these events President Bush should reconsider his decision to keep federal funds away from research on new lines of stem cells.

Remarkably, the first cloning of human embryos was announced at a press conference held by a private company. On the same day of the announcement, President Bush condemned human cloning as "morally wrong" and called upon Congress to ban it. Although bioethics issues have been overshadowed by the war on terrorism, they have been a central concern of the Bush administration. In an August national address, the first since his inauguration, President Bush announced an executive order ceasing federal funding for human stem-cell research on all but a few pre-existing lines of stem cells. Any further research would require cloning human stem cells.

The procedure used by Advanced Cell Technologies, known as therapeutic cloning, combines a donor egg with a patient's own genetic material to clone "personalized" tissue for transplantation, which may be more acceptable to the immune system than tissue made from a third party's stem cells. The technique is a far cry from abhorrent practices like the use of fetal-tissue research and essentially allows an individual to produce genetically identical copies of parts of his own body. This is a clump of cells in a petri dish, never an aborted fetus. It is using the refuse of human physiology — eggs that would otherwise confer benefit upon no one — to save already extant human lives. Unlike fetal tissue techniques that involve sacrificing a child to science, therapeutic cloning takes no life in exchange for this benefit.

Current regulations forced Advanced Cell Technology to conduct all of its research with private money, but the lack of government involvement effectively allowed the company to shroud its work in secrecy. Just before Bush's decision, Advanced Cell Technologies revealed that it had been covertly working on cloning human embryos for at least a year, paying women thousands of dollars for eggs from which researchers tried to make stem cells. The cloned embryos didn't last long, all dying while still microscopic, and though the goal of Advanced Cell Technology's research is therapeutic cloning — the manufacture of replacement tissues for medical use — rather than more difficult and even more questionable reproductive cloning, any practical application is still years away.

It would be an error to ascribe wicked motives to Advanced Cell Technologies. Stem-cell research and therapeutic cloning promise treatments for medical conditions that range from diabetes to Alzheimer's disease, and industrial secrecy should be understood as a competitive tactic against other biotech firms — not as a cover-up for fiendish scientific horrors.

Yet the fact remains that the first cloning of human embryos took place in relative secrecy and in response to market forces. This default state of affairs is perfectly acceptable for the development of new microchips, toasters, cars and even for "IT," the secret and over-hyped technological breakthrough slated to be revealed on Monday morning TV by Diane Sawyer and inventor Dean Kamen. Abandoning science to the private sector is less acceptable for biotechnological research because this kind of science creates enormous ethical questions about the nature and value of human life that are absent in developing, say, better vacuum cleaners. The next few years will see further scientific advances, and there is a risk that society will wake up to find significant moral choices pre-determined in private — and sometimes secret — research labs.

Accordingly, President Bush should rescind his executive order and permit federal funding of stem-cell research. To place a ban on all human cloning, as the president has suggested and congress might well do, would be a mistake and would foreclose precious avenues of scientific exploration. Yet to leave stem-cell and therapeutic cloning re-search wholly to the private sector would irresponsibly leave profound moral questions to the private sector. Federal money would solve both ends of the problem, generating improved scientific research while giving the American people (through their government) a say in setting the moral rules of their own society. Simply put, if you fund it, you regulate it; you control it. This authority is critical in view of the public's ambivalence toward genetic research — this summer the House of Representatives passed a bill banning human cloning for both research and reproduction which was then voted down in the Senate.

Additionally, allowing federal funding to flow to stem-cell research would permit greater academic involvement in this kind of science. At present, rules prevent government money from even paying for multi-purpose equipment used in stem-cell research and thus researchers at institutions of higher learning have been at a disadvantage. The deep moral questions inevitably raised by biotechnological research would be better placed in a scholarly environment more open to bioethical evaluation and less driven by the bottom-line concerns of corporate research.

Ultimately, the ethical questions —questions of what a human life is, and of the degree to which living human material can be made instrumental —coupled with the possibility of wondrous new cures to aid the most wretched in society, demand a public role in, but not the outright banning of, embryonic cloning. Federal funding will help ensure biotechnological research that fosters the ethical advancement of science while guarding against the horrors of its abuse. Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky is from New York, NY. He can be reached at cr@princeton.edu.