Fear of science
Cloning opponents warn of genetically engineered superhumans. But forget the slippery
slope: Medical advances need not lead to a Brave New World
BY DAN KENNEDY
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We are long past the time when all scientific progress was thought to be good.
Nuclear bombs are the most dramatic example of science gone bad, but there are
plenty of others.
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl proved what we already knew: that nuclear power
is just too dangerous. Pesticides boost crop yields, but they also poison the
land and, in some cases, our food. The internal-combustion engine contributes
to global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer. Antibiotics were one of
the great boons of the 20th century, but their overuse is giving rise to
exotic, drug-resistant, 21st-century variants of diseases long thought to have
been conquered, such as tuberculosis.
So it is no surprise that we are on the verge of outlawing human cloning.
Having already absorbed the lesson that science is too important to leave to
the scientists, we are now engaged in a national debate over whether to allow
this most science-fictionish of medical technologies to proceed.
But even though the impulse is understandable, an outright ban on cloning would
also be an enormous mistake. No one (well, hardly anyone) wants to see cloning
used to create exact genetic replicas of people -- or, once genetic engineering
has advanced, to create enhanced superhumans with traits such as superior
intelligence, resistance to disease, or, more controversially, a predisposition
to heterosexuality. But research into embryonic-cloning technology, aimed at
curing such illnesses and conditions as Parkinson's disease, diabetes, and
spinal-cord paralysis, is another matter altogether.
Last year, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill to ban
all cloning -- not just cloning aimed at creating new human beings, but also
so-called therapeutic cloning, which involves the creation of embryos for the
purpose of treating disease. Earlier this year, President Bush announced that
he, too, supports a total ban on cloning.
Now the Senate is considering two bills. One, proposed by Sam Brownback, a
Kansas Republican, and Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, would emulate the
House bill by banning all cloning. The other, sponsored by Dianne Feinstein, a
California Democrat, and Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, would outlaw
reproductive cloning -- that is, the kind aimed at manufacturing new people --
but would allow therapeutic cloning. Significantly, Feinstein-Specter's
co-sponsors include not just liberal Democrats such as Massachusetts's Ted
Kennedy and New York's Hillary Rodham Clinton, but also pro-life Republicans
such as Utah's Orrin Hatch.
The 100 senators, who are reported to be evenly divided, could vote on the
measures before Memorial Day. A vote for Feinstein-Specter would allow
promising medical research to continue. A vote for Brownback-Landrieu -- which
would almost certainly become law, given the positions already taken by the
House and the president -- would criminalize both types of cloning, thus
halting scientific research that could help us lead longer, healthier lives.
Long the stuff of speculation in science fiction and films such as 1978's
The Boys from Brazil (in which Josef Mengele attempts to manufacture
Hitler clones) and the latest Star Wars installment (titled Attack of
the Clones), cloning became a reality in 1997, when a British scientist
succeeded in creating a cloned sheep named "Dolly." That, in turn, sparked the
current debate over humans.
The first step in creating a clone consists of removing the genetic nucleus
from an egg -- a sheep's egg, a cow's egg, or a human woman's egg. The egg is
then injected with the nucleus of a cell from another animal or person.
Typically, skin cells are used. Once the transplanted nucleus is in place, the
egg is given a jolt of electricity (a nice Frankensteinian touch), which -- for
reasons that are not entirely clear -- begins to divide and develop, just as if
it had been fertilized by a sperm cell. (Or, more likely, fails to divide and
develop, since success in cloning is currently a rare thing.)
Normally a fertilized egg is the genetic progeny of two individuals, a male and
a female, with half the genes coming from each partner to create an utterly
unique being. A clone, though, receives all its genes from one source -- the
nucleus of a skin cell, to continue our example.
In reproductive cloning, the dividing, developing clone would be implanted in a
woman's uterus to grow into a fetus and, ultimately, a baby. The baby would be
an exact genetic replica of the skin-cell donor -- an identical twin, albeit of
a completely different age. Clones could even be created from long-dead
relatives. But in therapeutic cloning, division would be allowed to continue
only for a few days, until the embryo had reached the "blastocyst" stage --
somewhere between 100 and 200 cells. At that point, stem cells -- cells that
can be prodded into becoming any type of cell, be it heart, kidney, or brain --
would be extracted, thus killing the embryo.
Last year, President Bush announced that he would allow federally funded
stem-cell research to continue so long as scientists restricted their work to
existing supplies of stem cells -- as opposed to taking any new such cells from
unwanted embryos stored at fertility clinics, even though those embryos were
destined to be destroyed. Cloning extends and complicates the stem-cell issue.
Because a clone is an exact genetic duplicate of the donor, its stem cells
could be used to develop healthy new tissues that could be put back into the
donor's body without fear of rejection.
"If this research is allowed to succeed, by the time we grow old, this will be
a routine thing," says Robert Lanza, of the Worcester, Massachusetts-based
Advanced Cell Technology, in the current Atlantic Monthly. "You'll just
go and get a skin cell removed at the doctor's office, and they'll give you
back a new organ or some new tissue -- a new liver, a new kidney -- and you'll
be fixed. And it's not science fiction. This is very, very real."
Actually, it's not. Not yet, anyway, and the Atlantic story, written by
former biotech researcher Kyla Dunn, makes that clear. Someday, though, it
could be. The question is whether government will allow cloning-based medicine
to develop in the open -- or if, instead, it will merely drive cloning overseas
and underground, with consequences we can't even begin to predict.
SOMEONE -- I HAVE long since forgotten who -- once wrote that the first step
toward creating a police state is building a neighborhood police station. His
point wasn't that we should stop building police stations; quite the opposite.
Rather, his point was to show the fallacy of "slippery slope" arguments. We
shouldn't deny ourselves the obvious, practical benefit of a new police station
today because of the theoretical possibility that the station could become a
garrison in some police-state society tomorrow.
And so it would seem with cloning. There's something absurd about denying
ourselves the possible medical benefits of therapeutic cloning because of the
theoretical, if repulsive, possibility that it will be used to manufacture
human beings. Surely this is the absurd logical bottom at the end of the
slippery slope. The public understands this. According to a CNN/USA
Today/Gallup poll taken last November, the public disapproves of
reproductive cloning by a margin of 88 percent to nine percent -- but by 54
percent to 41 percent, it supports "cloning that is not designed to
specifically result in the birth of a human being, but is designed to aid
medical research that might find treatments for certain diseases."
At this point, it's fair to note that I have a personal interest in this.
My nine-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Rebecca, has achondroplasia, the most
common form of dwarfism. The cause: a genetic mutation that stunts the
growth of the long bones in the legs and arms, and that affects the
development of other bones as well. Someday it may be possible to create
cloned tissue from a baby or fetus with achondroplasia, extract stem cells, fix
the genetic defect, and flood the developing child with properly functioning
cells that his or her body recognizes as its own. The child might be taller;
far more important, he or she might be free of the spinal problems
characteristic of achondroplasia, problems that can cause pain, paralysis, even
death. (My interest is strictly theoretical, since I assume my daughter is
already too old to benefit from such a treatment, which probably lies decades
in the future.) I also happen to own stock in two companies whose prospects
would improve immediately if the government would give free rein to stem-cell
and therapeutic-cloning research.
But these conflicts of interest, if that's what they are, hardly make me
unique. If you have a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer's disease, if you
have a relative whose car accident left her a quadriplegic, if your father and
his father died young from heart attacks, then you, too, cannot claim to be
disinterested. As Michael Kinsley, who has Parkinson's disease, recently wrote
in a pro-therapeutic-cloning piece for Slate, "It seems more like a
bizarre convention than an ethical mandate that a person's views on a subject
should be considered less interesting if his life is at stake."
Of course, all our lives are at stake, even if few of us face the immediacy of
that truth the way Kinsley does. Yet in what might be called the highbrow
popular press -- the opinion pages of our elite newspapers, plus magazines such
as the New Republic, the Nation, the Weekly Standard, and
National Review, to name some of the most obvious examples -- the
argument has come down heavily against not just reproductive cloning, but
therapeutic cloning as well.
Yes, the Times' editorial page strongly favors cloning, and it's not
hard to find pro-cloning op-eds. But the heavyweight intellectual artillery has
pretty much all been on the opposing side. And it's come, ideologically, from
everywhere: the right, the center, and the left.
BY FAR THE MOST outspoken critic of cloning is Leon Kass, a sociologist at the
University of Chicago who chairs the President's Council on Bioethics. Kass,
who comes across in a recent Times profile as a moderate conservative,
is the author of two long, fierce anti-cloning essays for the New
Republic -- the first published in 1997, shortly after the announcement of
Dolly's birth, and the second (largely a rehash of the first) about a year
ago.
Kass directs most of his fire at reproductive cloning, but argues that
therapeutic cloning can't be countenanced because the two are inextricably
linked. In his 1997 essay he wrote that "the existence of cloned human embryos
in the laboratory, created to begin with only for research purposes, would
surely pave the way for later baby-making implantations." And, in truth, Kass
isn't too wild about cloning strictly limited to therapeutic use, either, as he
rails against "the utilitarian creation of embryonic genetic duplicates of
oneself, to be frozen away or created when necessary, in case of need for
homologous tissues or organs for transplantation."
Kass's opposition is of particular importance because he has George W. Bush's
ear. But he is hardly alone. Also in the New Republic, conservative
columnist Charles Krauthammer recently came out against therapeutic cloning
despite having endorsed stem-cell research last year. Among other things,
Krauthammer -- a physician, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics,
and, significantly, a wheelchair-user -- argues that therapeutic cloning makes
it necessary to engage in the dehumanizing practice of creating and then
destroying embryos, which, clumps of cells though they may be, are also
potential human beings. Wrote Krauthammer: "You can try to regulate embryonic
research to prohibit the creation of Brave New World monsters; you can build
fences on the slippery slope, regulating how many days you may grow an embryo
for research; but once you countenance the very creation of human embryos for
no other purpose than for their parts, you have crossed a moral frontier."
Another conservative, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, warns that
if therapeutic cloning is not banned, then "even darker nightmares" will surely
follow. Writing for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the
historian Francis Fukuyama (whose new book, Our Posthuman Future, is a
jeremiad against much of biotechnology) argues that isolationism and cloning
represent two excesses of 1990s-style libertarianism that society must reject.
In a similar vein, National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru wrote that "human
cloning is quickly rising to the top of issues that divide libertarians from
conservatives." (Ponnuru, a pro-life conservative, goes so far as to argue that
"therapeutic cloning is less defensible than reproductive cloning, because the
former involves the killing of a human being and the latter does not.")
If Kass, Krauthammer, and Fukuyama represent a center/center-right point of
view, and Kristol and Ponnuru hold down the right flank, what of the left?
Normally, the left could be counted on to support cloning -- or at least
therapeutic cloning -- as a natural outgrowth of its support for reproductive
freedom. After all, one can hardly have qualms about creating and destroying
days-old clumps of cells when one has no moral objections to first- and
second-trimester abortions.
But though mainstream liberals do, indeed, support therapeutic cloning, the
non-mainstream left -- the farther left, as it were -- has formed an alliance
with conservatives to oppose all forms of cloning. Earlier this year, 67
progressives signed a letter supporting a total ban on cloning -- a
counterweight (if a not particularly heavy one) to the 40 Nobel Prize winners
who petitioned President Bush, unsuccessfully, to allow therapeutic cloning to
continue.
Leftist gadfly Jeremy Rifkin, a long-time critic of all things biotech, wrote
in the Nation recently that therapeutic cloning is anti-woman (because
it provides financial incentives for potential egg donors to undergo intrusive
hormone treatments and surgery) and anti-freedom (because it could lead to
reproductive cloning and the rise of "a commercial eugenics civilization
. . . in which global life science companies become the ultimate
arbiters of the evolutionary process itself").
Another leftist, the environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben, argued on the
New York Times' op-ed page, "Cloning of any kind is a step toward
genetic engineering -- toward improving human beings. In other words, toward
leaving the natural world behind."
ON MAY 8, Severino Antinori, an Italian fertility doctor, announced that three
of his patients were pregnant with clones. He offered no details, and
scientific experts were highly skeptical of his claims. If he is telling the
truth, his actions would be monstrously unethical. Philosophical objections
aside, animal experiments show that cloning technology is a long way from being
perfected, and Antinori's project would likely result in the birth of babies
with heartbreaking deformities.
Antinori is, nevertheless, living proof that we can't afford the sort of
high-minded detachment advocated by the likes of Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama,
and Jeremy Rifkin. If someone opposes therapeutic cloning on religious or moral
grounds -- that is, if the objection is based on the belief that a 200-cell
blastocyst is a human life that must not be destroyed -- well, such a position
can at least be defended, in the same way that the absolutist anti-choice
position can be defended.
But if, instead, the objection to therapeutic cloning rests on the notion that
there's a slippery slope, and we're in danger of sliding down it, then that
position is, ultimately, indefensible. If therapeutic cloning is morally
acceptable but reproductive cloning isn't, then it's wrong -- immoral, even --
to object to the first because it might possibly lead to the second.
The scientist Gregory Stock, the author of Redesigning Humans: Our
Inevitable Genetic Future, put it this way in a March debate with Fukuyama
on the libertarian Web site Reason.com: "Any serious attempt to blockade such
research [that is, therapeutic cloning] will simply increase the upcoming
technologies' potential dangers by driving the work out of sight and depriving
us of early indications of any medical or social problems."
In other words, the federal government may have the power to put Advanced Cell
Technology out of business -- or at least force it to move from Worcester to
Britain or another more hospitable country. But the government cannot do
anything about the clones that may or may not be growing in the wombs of
Severino Antinori's patients.
In a piece for the May 5 Washington Post, Ted Halstead and Michael Lind,
of the centrist New America Foundation, noted that under the Brownback-Landrieu
bill to ban all cloning, an American who seeks clone-based treatment overseas
could be subject to arrest and imprisonment upon returning to the United
States.
"The repercussions of criminalizing therapeutic cloning would be nightmarish,"
they wrote. "It would be as if America's War on Drugs were duplicated by a far
more intrusive War on Medicine -- a war in which the federal government hunted
down and arrested ordinary Americans with treatable and curable illnesses."
The moral objections to therapeutic cloning are not frivolous. But as Gregory
Stock, Ted Halstead, and Michael Lind suggest, those objections fall apart when
they come up against the realities of the world in which we actually live.
There are dangers to allowing therapeutic cloning to move ahead, but the
alternative would be worse.
It's easy to avoid the slippery slope. It's much harder -- but necessary -- to
stake out a spot on that slope and push uphill for principles and values that
are worth fighting for. Therapeutic cloning holds incredible promise for curing
some of the most intractable medical conditions. Rather than wringing our hands
over the possibility that it might lead to a horrifying Brave New World, we
should draw lines and then defend those lines. Medical research, yes.
Genetically engineered humans, no.
Opponents would argue that they stand for not letting science control us. In
the process, though, they are letting their fear of science control
them.
Far better for us to control science -- or at least to give it our best shot.
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dan@dankennedy.net.
Issue Date: May 17 - 23, 2002
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