Bioethics panel puts brakes on cloning research

The significance of this recommendation may rest with its impact on federal lawmakers.

By Andis Robeznieks, amednews staff. Aug. 5, 2002.

Four of the six MDs on President Bush's Council on Bioethics were among the 10 members who voted recently to recommend banning reproductive cloning and place a four-year moratorium on therapeutic or biomedical research cloning. Seven members voted against the ban.

Panel Chair Leon Kass, MD, PhD, along with William B. Hurlbut, MD, Charles Krauthammer, MD, and Paul McHugh, MD, all voted with the majority; while Daniel Foster, MD, and Janet Rowley, MD, voted for a proposal allowing regulated use of cloned embryos for biomedical research.

According to Dr. Rowley, a professor of medicine and of molecular genetics and cell biology at the University of Chicago Medical Center, the recommendation has "no direct significance" on practicing physicians, but it has potential significance because of how it could sway Congress to vote on the various cloning-related bills under consideration.

"The impact will be if the Senate voted to approve cloning for biomedical research," she said. "That could potentially free up money for this type of research, and one hopes that at least some part of the research, over time, will prove beneficial for treatment of various types of diseases."

Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, sponsor of a bill banning all human cloning, issued a statement that he was "heartened" by the council's recommendation but disagreed with separating the types of cloning.

"Ultimately, all human cloning is reproductive," his statement read.

President Bush's bioethics panel voted to ban reproductive cloning.

California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein, sponsor of a bill that would ban reproductive cloning but allow cloning for stem cell research, issued a contrasting statement.

"Significantly, the president's hand-picked council did not support efforts by the president and others -- including a bill by Sen. Sam Brownback -- to ban critically important stem cell research that offers such hope to millions of Americans with incurable diseases," her statement read.

Although a petition opposing the moratorium has been signed by some 2,000 scientists and teachers, Dr. Hurlbut said he thought that it was the right thing now.

More than science at stake

"I think that the council is very mindful of the scientific and medical significance of all the issues associated with stem cell technology and cloning technology," Dr. Hurlbut said, adding that he was speaking for himself and not for the council.

"We tried to balance the state of the knowledge, the potential benefits and the concerns," he said. "The majority felt there needed to be a larger, more educated discussion of the issues."

A consulting professor of human biology who teaches bioethics at California's Stanford University, Dr. Hurlbut proposes that scientists look deeper and try to find a new way to develop disease-fighting cells besides cloning embryos to harvest stem cells.

The bioethics panel recommends a four-year cloning research moratorium.

Dr. Hurlbut describes cloning embryos to gain stem cells as creating life so that one can disassemble it for its parts. He argues that the public needs to acknowledge the "symbolic significance" of doing this. "More than science is at stake here," he said. "We're crossing moral boundaries."

In addition, Dr. Hurlbut said science was entering "the age of developmental biology." Researchers are beginning to understand how "the body is assembled," and this includes more than just body parts. It includes the mind, consciousness and personality.

Since so much of how this occurs is unknown, he believes a four-year period of knowledge gathering would be time well spent.

"We need to set the direction for future technology," Dr. Hurlbut said. "It's as though we're on the launching pad of this new technology, and we need to get the trajectory right."

In the council's report to the president, many members wrote personal statements, including Dr. Hurlbut.

"Unlike an assembly of parts in which a manufactured product is in no sense 'present' until there is a completed construction, a living being has a continuous unfolding existence that is inseparable from its emerging form," Dr. Hurlbut wrote. "It is this implicit whole, with its inherent potency, that endows the embryo with its human character and therefore its inviolable moral status."

In his statement, Dr. Foster, chair of the Dept. of Internal Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, has a much different opinion of cloned embryos.

"There is no doubt that a 5- or 6-day-old embryo is potentially human, but it cannot become a human by itself as would occur in normal human conception," he wrote. "The one- or 200-cell organism, the blastocyst, is neither viable nor feeling; there are no organs and there is no brain.

"There is nothing it can do without external help and implantation," Dr. Foster continued. "From the standpoint of science, it is potentially human, but biologically prehuman. The evidence for this conclusion seems unarguable to me."

There is even some disagreement among those in the majority. Dr. McHugh, director of the Dept. of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, voted with the majority's recommendation but disagreed with its implication that therapeutic cloning or "somatic cell nuclear transfer" creates a new individual being.

"An overemphasis on potential would lead us to the unreasonable position that, since every one of our somatic cells has 'potential' for producing a human, it should receive some reverence," Dr. McHugh wrote.

Enough discussion already

Dr. Rowley did not write a statement but said she disagreed with the moratorium and declared that what was needed was less talking and more research to learn whether stem cell technology lives up to its promise.

"I think that we already have had a lot of discussion, and that doesn't seem to be acknowledged by the majority," she said. "I don't see how four more years of discussion -- particularly when we can't answer the question 'What good is it?' -- is a particularly good use of the time."

That said, Dr. Rowley acknowledged that the council's discussion had been important and that, if the vote had taken place in January, the outcome would have been different.

"I think there would have been a number of people voting for an outright ban," she said. "So I think that it has influenced some people."