The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) made headlines when it issued a broadside that would, if followed by Congress, grant an open-ended license for biotech researchers to clone human life. True, the NAS recommended that Congress ban "reproductive" cloning, that is, the use of a cloned embryo to produce a born baby. But it also urged that human cloning for purposes of experimentation--often called "therapeutic" or "research" cloning--remain unimpeded by legal restrictions. Such a public policy would permit virtually unlimited human cloning--so long as all the embryos created thereby were destroyed rather than implanted in a woman's womb.
The recommendation from a well-known scientific organization did not appear at this particular time by coincidence. The Senate will soon consider S. 790, legislation authored by Sam Brownback (R-KS) that would prohibit any creation of human clones--whether for research purposes or for reproduction. The House passed a virtually identical ban in a bipartisan vote last summer, and President Bush strongly supports the bill.
Thus the legal future of human cloning--and the potential fortunes to be made by Big Biotech in the United States--hang in the balance in the Brownback bill.
Limiting the ban on human cloning to procedures designed to lead to the birth of a baby would accomplish next to nothing. Figuring out how to clone human life successfully is going to be very difficult. Thus, early research would likely focus on perfecting techniques. Should this be successful, researchers would next attempt to maintain the resulting embryonic clone for a week to two weeks--long enough to harvest their stem cells. (The biotech company Advanced Cell Technology announced it has created human clones and maintained them to the six-cell stage(Advanced), which is not long enough for stem cells to appear.) Should the stem-cell Rubicon be crossed, implantation of the embryonic clone would...