Moral issues hinder scientific progress

  Gregory Stock Dr. Stock is the director
of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society. He is a
visiting professor in the neuropsychiatry and biobehavior
department..

Born in Scotland on July 5, 1996, Dolly was the first animal
cloned using the nucleus of an adult cell. The announcement of her
birth rocked the world, because it made people confront the
possibility that we would one day follow in her path.

At the time, some observers dismissed this possibility,
emphasizing that scientists had needed 277 attempts to produce a
single lamb. But the public was not convinced, and with good
reason. Successful clonings of mice, cows, goats and pigs followed.
Efforts to clone cats and dogs began. And less than five years
after Dolly’s birth, lo and behold, a fertility specialist,
Dr. Panos Zavos, sat before a worried congressional committee
testifying that he would clone a human.

Human cloning has aroused strong passions because of its message
that technology would soon reshape even the flow of life from one
generation to the next. In-vitro fertilization (IVF) carried the
same message in 1978 when Louise Brown became the first test-tube
baby, but we could pretend then that this was merely a treatment
for infertility rather than the start of new chapter in human
reproduction.

Recent congressional debate about cloning has focused on safety
issues, because the procedure is clearly too dangerous for human
use at present. The deeper debate, however, is largely religious
and revolves around whether we are willing to play God by tampering
with human reproduction.

Were the issue anything less, the debate’s intensity would
not make sense. After all, even in the unlikely event that one of
the threatened efforts to clone humans succeeds sometime soon,
success will not come easily and a routine clinical procedure will
not be imminent. Moreover, only small numbers of people with unique
family situations or special medical conditions seem interested in
the procedure, so it is not about to displace normal baby
making.

As for the danger of the birth of a damaged child through
reckless cloning attempts, this alone cannot account for the strong
reaction to cloning. Our society largely ignores chronic alcohol
abuse during pregnancy, which is virtually certain to damage far
more children.

In reality, reproductive cloning is unlikely to occur soon and
even less likely to be used much should it become safe. Moreover,
though cloning is portrayed as something radical, biologically it
would be conservative, because it would not bring a new genetic
constitution into being, but create a genetic copy of someone who
already exists. A delayed identical twin is unfamiliar and strange,
but hardly earth shattering.

Cloning is largely a sideshow to other more important
developments now unfolding. Embryo screening during in-vitro
fertilization, for instance, is poised to carry the genomics
revolution to human reproduction.

So-called preimplantation genetic diagnosis or PGD removes a
single cell from a six- or eight-cell embryo and tests it
genetically so that parents can decide whether to implant the
embryo. In essence, such parents are able to make conscious choices
about the genetics of their child-to-be.

Today, only couples at high risk of having a child with cystic
fibrosis or some other serious genetic disease use the technology,
but as deeper genetic analysis becomes feasible, usage will likely
spread. This could signal a significant change in the character of
human reproduction, because although genetics does not tell us our
destiny, it tells us a great deal about our predispositions and
vulnerabilities.

Human cloning is only one of a broad front of new technologies
that will likely emerge as we unravel our biology. We may be able
to delay some of these technologies, but probably not for long,
because they are mere spin-offs of medical research that everyone
supports.

Virtually no serious scientists or physicians care about human
cloning; they care about fighting disease and about using our new
understandings of our biology to improve our lives. We are not
going to forego these possibilities; they promise us too much. So
in the decades ahead, we are going to have to learn to handle a
whole range of challenging new options in human reproduction and in
medicine itself.

The techniques for human reproductive cloning, for example,
could also be used to create personalized embryonic stem cells,
which have great potential for treating various diseases. Some
maintain that embryos are not needed because adult stem cells are
adequate substitutes. I am suspicious of this argument, however,
because we still know so little about this realm.

Furthermore, if researchers generally believed this, why would
they fight difficult and unpleasant political battles to try to do
this research?

There will be no easy answers about such questions, but in my
view, it is tragic when arcane theological and political debates
intrude not merely into the regulation of clinical practice, but
into medical research itself.

The debate over the time at which life begins and is worthy of
protection is the quintessential example of this. A consensus will
never exist, even among religious faiths. Before 1869, Catholic
dogma maintained that life was infused with a soul weeks after
conception; the Jewish faith fixes the delay at 40 days; Muslims
believe the time is even later.

Few will change their minds easily about such beliefs, but ours
is a diverse, secular society, so we wisely try not to resolve such
theological battles in our laws. Doing so is too divisive.
Unfortunately, these issues touch us so deeply that this path may
be difficult to maintain in the decades ahead. We must try,
however.

We have already decided that in the United States, a woman can
have an abortion if she chooses, and embryos can be discarded when
they are no longer wanted. Until this changes, how can we justify
not allowing medical researchers to use these same cells in the
pursuit of life-saving treatments for disease?

The United States has always been good at developing new
technology and trying to extract benefits from it. The challenge
facing us today is not how we handle cloning, embryo selection or
any other specific technology. We will muddle through as we always
have.

Unlike nuclear weapons, these technologies will be very
forgiving; they carry no threats of imminent destruction to
multitudes of innocent bystanders. The crucial choice before us is
whether we will continue to embrace the possibilities of the future
or will pull back and relinquish their development to other braver
souls in other more adventurous regions of the world.