Go Forth and Replicate

The age of human cloning has arrived.
by Eric Cohen
05/30/2005, Volume 010, Issue 35

CONSCIENCE IS A SLIPPERY THING. In 2001, during the first few months of the Bush presidency, America engaged in a debate about the ethics of embryo research. The policy question was narrow: Should the federal government use public funds to support stem cell research that involves embryo destruction? But everyone knew that the issue was actually much larger--about whether we should be the kind of country that uses some (nascent) lives to benefit others, the kind of country that plunges ahead in revolutionary new areas of biotechnology without establishing clear moral limits.

Research advocates made their case by saying that thousands of embryos in fertilization clinics were "going to die anyway," and that of course no one was suggesting we create human embryos solely for research. The ethical argument was unconvincing--being destined to die hardly turns human beings into things, otherwise no one would feel safe in a nursing home. But at least the research advocates endorsed the notion that there was a line they did not want us to cross.

Today, most advocates of embryonic stem cell research offer no limits and seem to accept no compromises. Last week, a team of South Korean and American researchers announced a successful experiment: They had created scores of cloned human embryos that they then destroyed to produce 11 stem cell lines. So we have truly entered the age of human cloning. Any competent team of researchers in a laboratory anywhere in the world can now create cloned human embryos to the blastocyst stage--and then try to implant them in efforts to initiate a pregnancy. If they fail, they can--and some will--try and try again. To be sure, there will be many grotesque failures along the way to cloned babies--just as there were when Dolly the cloned sheep was created. And the children who make it to birth will inevitably suffer deformities and health problems. But the first cloned child is coming soon, and with it a new, terrible moment in the history of modern science.

In America, there are currently no prohibitions and no limits on human cloning. There are no limits on the creation and destruction of human embryos. There are no limits on the implantation of human embryos into animal wombs to generate fetuses for spare parts. There are no limits on the creation of man-animal hybrids using animal sperm and human eggs or human sperm and animal eggs. There are no real ethical limits on anything.

This week, the House of Representatives will likely vote on a bill (sponsored by Delaware Republican Mike Castle and Colorado Democrat Diana DeGette) to provide federal funding for research involving the destruction of embryos left over in fertility clinics. Castle-DeGette is being sold as a moderate measure--very strange, because the current funding policy is already so moderate. Embryo research proceeds in the private sector; many avenues of stem cell research are funded by the government; but those citizens who believe embryo destruction is a grave evil are not forced to be directly complicit in this activity.

The Castle-DeGette bill is also strange because any imagined federal funding in this area would be tiny compared with the $3 billion California has already made available for this research. And it is strange because the loudest advocates for funding research on "spare" embryos are also the loudest advocates for advancing research involving the creation and destruction of cloned human embryos for research.

Go Forth and Replicate