A rchive Date
[ 26-01-2003 ]
Category
[ Science ]
sub-Categoy
[ Biotechnology ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/leishman.html
Cloning for research divides council
Some scientists would proceed with it, subject to regulations, while others urge caution.
By RORY LEISHMAN - London Free Press
January 26, 2003
Most Canadians are opposed to human cloning that is intended to produce a child with virtually the same genes as some currently living or previously existing individual.
What, though, about the so-called therapeutic cloning of human embryos? Should this practice be outlawed as well?
This, of course, is a matter of urgent importance and hot debate among medical researchers and bioethicists.
For a careful statement of the best arguments for and against cloning for biomedical research, an excellent source is Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry by The President's Council on Bioethics.
This body was created by U.S. President George W. Bush to provide a forum for the discussion and evaluation of ethical issues in biomedical science.
The council is not just a partisan mouthpiece for the president. It is a distinguished panel headed by Leon Kass, a prominent medical doctor and professor of ethics at the University of Chicago, and includes 16 others who rank among the leading scientists, doctors, ethicists, social scientists, lawyers and theologians in the United States.
All members of this outstanding panel agree that cloning to produce children is unsafe, immoral and should not be attempted.
In support of this conclusion, the panel points out that cloning experiments with sheep and at least six other species have resulted in high rates of deformity and disability among live-born cloned animals.
Given that human cloning is not likely to be any more successful, any medical researcher who even attempts such a perilous procedure would be committing an act of criminal irresponsibility.
The ethical issues entailed by cloning human embryos for biomedical research are not quite so straightforward.
On this subject, the council could not reach a consensus. Seven members think such research should be allowed, subject to strict government regulation, while the remaining 10, including Kass, favour either an immediate ban on cloning for biomedical research or at least a four-year moratorium to allow more time for democratic deliberation on the serious moral implications of this kind of research.
On one crucial point, all 17 panellists are agreed: Cloning for biomedical research is "morally controversial because it involves the deliberate production, use and ultimate destruction of cloned human embryos."
This research does not entail, as some other scientists contend, the deliberate killing of only some subhuman, so called "pre-embryo."
How, then, can seven of the panellists justify the killing of human embryos for biomedical research?
Some contend the human embryo is the moral equivalent of all other human cells, while others maintain it has only, "a developing and intermediate moral worth that commands our special respect."
Why, though, should human life be deemed less sacred at one stage than another?
Most members of the panel hold that demeaning human life at its beginning, "denies the continuous history of human individuals from the embryonic to fetal to infant stages of existence; it misunderstands the meaning of potentiality; and it ignores the hazardous moral precedent that the routinized creation, use and destruction of nascent human life would establish."
On this basis, Kass and a majority of his colleagues on the council affirm: "We believe it is morally wrong to exploit and destroy developing human life, even for good reasons."
Supporters of cloning for biomedical research point out that the procedure might lead to treatments and cures for many dreaded diseases and disabilities. Perhaps so, but that's irrelevant.
The majority of The President's Council on Bioethics aptly responds: "As much as we wish to alleviate suffering now and to leave our children a world where suffering can be more effectively relieved, we also want to leave them a world in which we and they want to live - a world that honours moral limits, that respects all life whether strong or weak, and that refuses to secure the good of some human beings by sacrificing the lives of others."
The Parliament of Canada is currently debating a government bill that proposes to ban all human cloning, either for research or producing live-born children.
That's good, but insufficient. To uphold the sanctity of all human life, the bill should be amended to ban all research that involves the deliberate killing of any human embryo, cloned or uncloned.
Write Rory at The London Free Press, P.O. Box 2280, London, Ont. N6A 4G1 or fax 519-667-4528 or E-mail. Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lfpress.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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