The potential to cure

Currently, there are two bills working their way through Congress, both entitled the "Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001." The bill offered by Senators Feinstein and Kennedy (Dem.) would ban only reproductive cloning — cloning that would lead to the birth of a child — whereas the bill sponsored by Senators Brownback, Bond '60 and Smith (Rep.) would ban both reproductive and therapeutic cloning.

Underneath all of the controversy and political rhetoric, it is important for us to carefully examine the arguments for and against both forms of cloning, in order to make an informed decision as a society.

In a speech last Wednesday, President Bush expressed worries that cloning research would inevitably lead to "a society in which human beings are grown for spare body parts and children are engineered to custom specifications." Both of these concerns may be unfounded.

The president is mistaken that cloning will result in children that are engineered to custom specifications. Cloning can only reproduce an existing genome — the only specifications that can be used are those that already exist. Clones would be less "engineered" than babies born through in vitro fertilization, whose traits can be influenced by the choice of a certain egg donor or the choice to implant a certain embryo instead of another, and even these embryos are not truly "engineered" — no scientist has actually altered their existing genes. We need to be careful to separate the issues of cloning and genetic engineering, as some of the reasons in support of one or against one may not apply to the other.

It is true that reproductive cloning may be unsafe for the resulting children at the present time, but better technology will eventually alleviate this worry. Criticisms about the success rate of cloning are likely not as large a concern as some people claim. The success rate of the process that created Dolly the sheep was higher than that of IVF during its first five years.

Therapeutic cloning has the potential to revolutionize medical care. Right now in the United States, there are thousands of people who die every year waiting for organ donations. Even when patients receive a donated organ, their bodies often reject it. Therapeutic cloning would allow patients to create an embryo with genetic material identical to their own through somatic cell nuclear transfer. The stem cells derived from this embryo might have the potential to treat spinal cord injuries, juvenile diabetes and numerous other disorders. They would also be able to guide these cells along the path to development into a certain type of tissue, such as neural tissue.

Currently, complex organs such as hearts and kidneys cannot be grown outside a human body. However, some scientists think that using biodegradable molds might facilitate organ development outside the body sometime in the future if more research is done. We should be aware that if we ban therapeutic cloning entirely, this research may not be able to reach its full potential.

All this is not to say that cloning, reproductive or therapeutic, is morally invulnerable to criticism. There are certainly more considerations to take into account than one can address in a short column. However, we hope to encourage campus dialogue about the topic and to question the information we are being given by our representatives, so that every reader will go away from this page a little more educated about the topic. Heather Aspras is a Wilson School major from Pitman, N.J. She can be reached at haspras@princeton.edu.