Experts Urge Ban On Cloned Babies

But Panel Backs Embryo Research

Congress should pass a law prohibiting the creation of cloned human babies but should not interfere with medical research involving human embryo clones, a panel of influential scientific experts has concluded.

In a report released yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences, which was chartered by Congress to advise the federal government, the panel concluded that human reproduction by cloning should be illegal because it poses a high risk of injury or death to the clones and to women who would bear those clones.

The experience with animal cloning to date, in which most clones have died prematurely or harbored serious defects, strongly suggests that production of babies by cloning "is dangerous and likely to fail," according to the 113-page NAS report, which looked only at scientific issues and not moral or ethical concerns. "The panel, therefore, unanimously supports the proposal that there should be a legally enforceable ban on the practice of human reproductive cloning."

Several researchers said they could not think of any previous instance when such a prestigious group of scientists had called for a full-blown legal ban on a budding field of investigation. But for many opponents of human cloning, the recommendations do not go far enough because they do not call for a similar ban on the production of human embryo clones for research. Scientists hope such research will lead to better sources of embryonic stem cells, which show promise as treatments for a variety of diseases.

"This little group is just flying cover for the biotech industry's plans to set up human embryo farms," said Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee.

The report's release came a week before the Senate is to begin consideration of several bills aimed at restricting human cloning to various degrees. The House has passed a bill that would ban the creation of human embryo clones ("research cloning") and the transferring of those clones to a woman's womb to make cloned babies ("reproductive cloning").

Johnson's group and others are lobbying the Senate to pass a bill that mirrors the House version -- an approach that the White House supports. "As the president has stated, 'We should not, as a society, grow life to destroy it,' " White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said yesterday.

A coalition of patient advocates and medical research groups is pushing the Senate to pass a bill along the lines of the NAS recommendations, outlawing only reproductive cloning. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who supports that approach, said yesterday that he was "delighted" with the NAS report. "It is vital that the hands of the scientific community must not be tied if people who suffer from Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and many other diseases are to receive the benefits of stem cells and transplants," he said.

Simultaneous with the NAS report's release, the newly created President's Council on Bioethics was wrapping up its first two-day meeting, much of which was devoted to human cloning and embryo research.

Unlike the NAS panel, with its focus limited to scientific issues, the council -- created by President Bush in November -- is charged with examining the moral and ethical issues raised by cloning and other advances.

In its meetings Thursday and yesterday, the first of several in which the group will consider cloning and related issues, the council stopped far short of making policy recommendations. Chairman Leon Kass of the University of Chicago said he hoped the group would resist the temptation to struggle for quick consensus or give specific advice to the president.

Rather, he said, he wants the group to develop a "better way of doing bioethics" than has been practiced by similar commissions in the past.

That "better way" is still evolving, but on the basis of this week's sessions, it appears that it will include a fair amount of philosophical discussion at an altitude significantly above everyday policy concerns. Council members talked about the kinds of love that may exist, the conflicting human desires to passively "savor the world" and actively "save the world," the allure of perfection and immortality, and the struggle between "freedom" and "finitude."

Several members struggled to articulate why cloning is "repugnant," and columnist and council member Charles Krauthammer suggested that unless those arguments are articulated in a rational way, "we lose," and advocates of cloning who speak of the "freedom" to pursue the science will win.

Daniel Foster, chairman of internal medicine at University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, said that for now he worried more about "safety" issues but could envision a time when cloning might be useful and safe in the future.

A few advocacy groups raised criticisms yesterday about the council's makeup, with some noting that it lacks any patient advocate to articulate the interests of those who might benefit from human embryo-derived therapies.

Others urged the council to conclude that the production of cloned human embryos and the production of cloned babies are equally unethical. If a legal ban focused only on reproductive cloning and not on the production of the embryos, the result would be a de facto federal insistence on embryo destruction, said Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

"A ban solely on reproductive cloning is a ban not on cloning but on gestation and birth. Instead of banning the creation of the cloned organism, it bans its later survival," Doerflinger told the council during public testimony yesterday. "In short, we should ban cloning by forbidding people to make a clone, not by forbidding them to be a clone."

By contrast, the NAS report reiterated the findings of a report by a different NAS panel, released Sept. 11, which distinguished between research cloning and reproductive cloning and was supportive of ongoing experiments on embryo clones. Science and patient advocacy groups -- including the Biotechnology Industry Organization and the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research -- yesterday hailed the new NAS report for emphasizing differences between human reproductive cloning and research on human embryo clones.

Some supporters of research had hoped the NAS would stop short of setting the precedent of calling for a full ban and issue instead a fierce but non-legally-binding condemnation of cloning babies. Scientists in the past have imposed upon themselves moratoriums on controversial lines of research, most famously a 1974 hiatus on genetic engineering research until it was shown to be safe.

But the prevailing view, according to a source familiar with the panel's deliberations, was that only a call for a full legal ban would have the political weight to counter opponents' efforts to ban reproductive and research cloning.

A Senate committee is set to hold a hearing on human cloning Thursday, and the full Senate is expected to debate the issue by March.