4. Human cloning: pros & cons

A human embryo has been cloned in the United States. Or was it not an embryo yet?

The sensation came from the small provincial town of Worcester, Mass. Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. reported a human embryo. And not one but three. The intension is not to create a human being but to obtain stem cells that could be used to treat an array of diseases – from diabetes to heart attacks to Alzheimer’s to Parkinson’s.

Talking live on NBC, ACT CEO Michael West presented the achievement as a dramatic breakthrough. Asked what he thought about the US administration’s concern, west said that against the mountain of opportunities opened up by the new technology, the White House’s concern was a mere mole hill.

Meanwhile, the concern is growing, and not only within the administration. There are quite a few organizations and individuals in the United States who are scared of the “brave new world” envisioned by West. One such is the Catholic Church, which has tens of millions of followers in the country. (The Vatican promptly set the tone, roundly condemning the experiments). Moreover in government circles the ACT had to contend with opposition from Bush and his cabinet. On top of that, censure instantly came from congressmen and senators representing both parties. American law-makers will apparently take their cue from their British colleagues and ban human cloning altogether.

In the meantime, George Bush has set up a bioethics committee in the White House, comprised of 18 scientists and experts. The council will soon be up and running, under Dean Clancy, who has just been appointed its executive director. Clancy, an expert on medical ethics, has until recently been senior political adviser to U.S. Congress

The council will advise the president on the line to take in the event of yet another attack by “moral pundits” or “advocates of progress.” Bush believes that the use of embryos for cloning is unacceptable. American society, he says, cannot allow anyone to create a life only to destroy it.

Exercising his powers under the law, the president issued an executive directive denying federal funding to research institutions or individual researchers who derive cell from embryos that are subsequently destroyed or create embryos for search purposes or clone embryos for whatever purposes.

The position of the Republican Party is very close to that of the Pro-Life Action League. This anti-abortion organization argues that scientists deceive the public by denying that the moment of conception is the start of a new life.

In addition to the controversy over the moral acceptability of human embryo cloning, there is another dispute in progress – over the extent to which the Massachusetts researchers’ achievement is in fact an achievement. Many of their colleagues allege that it isn’t worth a damn. Division of an egg, caused by the removal of its nucleus and introduction of a donor skin cell, was arrested at a very early stage, when one cell had produced six. “So what?” skeptics ask. Meaning, try and grow an embryo until a human is born.

We’ll soon get one born, says Clonaid, support the position of Michael West and his ACT associates; at an early age of development, an embryo is not a human being but a certain number of reproductive cells: brain, liver, muscle tissue and so forth. Almost simultaneously with the ACT report on cloning a human embryo, another one came in: a team of Australian and Israeli researchers used an IVF mouse embryo to obtain pre-brain cells, which they then implanted into the brain of a live mouse, where the implant developed into proper brain cells, identical to the recipient’s “native” cells. Isn’t that great news for those suffering from Parkinson’s disease?

In the first two weeks of its existence, scientists say, an embryo is not yet a fetus but something preceding it; just a cluster of cells. These clusters can merge with each other or they can divide. Cells can survive or die. The majority pass through maternal organism never stopping in the uterus. So even if a group of cells is produced artificially, including by cloning, this has nothing to do with human life: there is none yet.

Religious organizations object that any cell group in the uterus can potentially develop into a living organism. Yet over the centuries religion has often revised its attitude to the issue of when exactly a life begins. Nor is there a consensus among different religions: some believe that life begins with insemination; others contend it is 40 days after insemination; still others, with an embryo’s first movement in the womb, and finally, with the birth of a baby.

Secular authorities have also been known to revise their views on the issue. Today Washington officialdom is against. But it may well make a U-turn when and if people start being cured of paralysis or cancer thanks to artificially grown cells.