The public's stake - Biotechnology: A House Divided

FOR the first six months of this year, the President's Council on Bioethics met to consider the moral, biomedical, and human significance of human cloning in order to advise President Bush on the subject. The council's report, Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry, was issued in July, and a paperback edition has just been published by Public Affairs. [+]

Among the charges to the President's Council on Bioethics were the following: to provide a forum for the national discussion of bioethical issues and to facilitate a greater understanding of these issues. Our report, in addition to providing policy recommendations, was intended to serve both of these purposes.

The commercial publication of this volume and the convening of this book forum are intended to help us to perform our mission. I am very grateful to Paul Golob of Public Affairs, to Chris DeMuth of the American Enterprise Institute, and to my fellow panelists for helping us in this work.

I want to summarize the content of the report in five points: First, the council sought to examine the subject of human cloning in full by considering the human goods that cloning might serve or endanger--not just whether the technique is feasible or safe. We sought also to assess the impact of growing biotechnical powers over human life and their effect on human procreation, on the goals and limits of biomedical science, and on the meaning of the activity of healing. It was of primary importance to put cloning in its proper place, both humanly speaking and also in the context of other biotechnical powers now gathering for manipulating the human body and mind.

Second, the council strived to formulate fair and accurate terminology. Human cloning is a subject that has been bedeviled by confusing and manipulative speech. Our goal was to clarify the terminology, beginning with the idea of human cloning itself. Whatever the purpose for which human cloning is undertaken, the act that produces the genetic replica is the creation of an embryonic clone. Accordingly, the council has insisted that what we mean by human cloning is the production of cloned human embryos, the earliest stage of developing human life. This act of cloning may be undertaken with the intention of either transferring these embryos to a uterus to initiate a pregnancy or taking them apart in order to obtain stem cells for research.

In popular discussion, the first use has been called "reproductive cloning" or just "cloning." The second has come to be called "therapeutic cloning," "research cloning," or "nuclear transfer for stem cell research." The council, instead, chose to call these uses respectively "cloning-to-produce-children" and "cloning-for-biomedical-research." These terms are accurate. And they allow us to debate the moral questions without euphemistic distortion or Orwellian speech. Whether one favors or opposes cloning-to-produce-children, whether one favors or opposes cloning-for-biomedical-research, the council insists that we must acknowledge that both uses of cloning begin with the same act, the production of cloned human embryos.

THE third point taken up by the council was the ethics of cloning-to-produce-children. Regarding cloning-to-produce-children, the council is in agreement with majority opinion both in America and the Congress. The council was unanimous, in fact, that cloning-to-produce-children should be opposed, both morally and legally. Not only is the technique demonstrably unsafe, but it can never be safely attempted. And the council opposes this practice not only because it is unsafe, but because it would imperil the freedom and dignity of the cloned child, the cloning parents, and the entire society. In its report, the council also argues that by enabling parents for the first time to predetermine the entire genetic makeup of their children, we would be taking a major step toward turning procreation into manufacturing. Cloning-to-produce-children would also confound family relations and personal identity, create new stresses between parents and offspring, and might open the door to a new eugenics where parents or societ y could replicate the genomes of individuals whom they deem to be superior.

The fourth area taken up by the council was the ethics of cloning-for-biomedical-research. And here the council, like the nation, was divided. On the one hand, we acknowledge that the research offers the prospect, though speculative at the moment, of gaining valuable knowledge and treatments for many diseases. On the other hand, this practice would require the exploitation and destruction of nascent human life created solely for the purpose of research.

Individual council members weighed these moral concerns differently. Yet all members of the council--and I am delighted about this--agreed that each side in this debate had something vital to defend, not only for itself but for all of us. Each side understood that we cannot afford to be casual about human suffering, to be cavalier regarding how we treat nascent human life, or to be indifferent about how we decide amongst the alternatives. Each side recognized that we must face up to the moral burden of either approving or disapproving this research, namely, on the one hand, that some who might be healed more rapidly might not be; and on the other hand, that we will become a society that creates and uses some human lives in the service of others.

FINALLY, the council offered two policy recommendations, each of them distinct from the most prominent legislative proposals considered in Congress. Both recommendations called for a permanent ban on cloning-to-produce-children, thus giving public force to the nation's strong ethical verdict against this practice. Where the council differed was on how to approach cloning-for-biomedical-research.

A minority of the council recommended that we proceed now with such potentially crucial research, but only with significant regulations in place, including federal licensing, oversight, and strict limits on how long cloned embryos may be allowed to develop. A majority of the council, myself included, recommended that no human cloning of any kind be permitted at this time. We proposed that Congress enact a ban on all attempts at cloning-to-produce-children and a four-year federal moratorium on cloning-for-biomedical-research, beginning with the act of the production of cloned human embryos.

We argued for this moratorium on a number of grounds. It would provide more time to debate whether we should cross this crucial moral boundary--that of creating human life solely as a resource for research. A moratorium would allow time for other areas of stem cell research, both adult and embryonic, to proceed. It would allow time for those who believe that cloning-for-biomedical-research can never ethically be pursued to make their case, and for those who disagree to design a responsible system of regulation and public oversight.

A national moratorium would also allow the debate on the question of research on cloned embryos to be taken up in the larger context, where it belongs, the context of embryo research generally, and of the future possibilities of genetic engineering of human life. Pending such debate, the majority of the council held that no law should now be enacted that approves or authorizes any human cloning.

With the Senate, now in recess, having failed to act on the cloning legislation, we find these questions still before us and likely to return for legislative consideration. Yet, even as we speak, Italian embryologist Severino Antinori claims that a clonal pregnancy is in the works and that the first cloned child may be born soon.

I think it behooves us as human beings and citizens to step forward and urge our legislative representatives to act when they next convene, and to continue to think about the deepest human and social implications of the biotechnology revolution now underway.

Editor's Note: The essays in this section are adapted from remarks made at the American Enterprise Institute Book Forum, "Human Cloning and Human Dignity," October 29, 2002.

[+] U. S. Government Printing Office; Public Affairs. 400 pp. $14.00.

LEON R. KASS is the Roger and Susan Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics.

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