As human cloning advances, ethics debate gets louder
Pastor Dale Morgan
As human cloning advances, ethics debate gets louder*
Informed consent, human life at issue
By Sandi Dolbee
UNION-TRIBUNE RELIGION & ETHICS EDITOR
January 18, 2008
The possible has become the probable. A human embryo has been cloned by
using a woman's egg cells and a man's skin cells. Biology and morality
have crossed paths again.
And so has a question for the ages: Just because you can do it, does it
make it right?
California voters gave a green light to this kind of research – known as
somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT for short – when they approved
the historic $3 billion stem cell funding initiative in November 2004.
Proposition 71 said state-funded researchers could clone human embryos
for the purpose of deriving stem cells as long as the embryos aren't
kept beyond 12 days.
Still, the announcement from Stemagen Corp. in La Jolla was met by
surprise from Marcy Darnovsky, associate executive director of the
Center for Genetics and Society, a biotech watchdog group in Oakland.
“Yikes,” Darnovsky said yesterday when told about the development.
While the Center for Genetics and Society supports some forms of
embryonic stem cell research, it opposes cloning.
The way Darnovsky sees it, it's expensive, it turns women who donate
eggs into human guinea pigs and it lacks adequate federal safeguards
against using the technology to reproduce human beings.
“For Californians who earmarked a large sum of public money for this
research, we want to make sure that money is used wisely,” she said.
“SCNT isn't a good use of that public money.”
But supporters say that if done ethically, the medical benefits of
so-called therapeutic cloning outweigh the concerns.
Among those benefits: a new source for embryonic stem cells, which have
the almost magical ability to become any cell in the body and could hold
the key for repairing damaged organs and curing such illnesses as
Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases.
“Personally, as long as the informed-consent process is robust, this
seems like a reasonable thing to try,” said Michael Kalichman, director
of UCSD's research ethics program and co-founder of San Diego's Center
for Ethics in Science and Technology.
Ted Peters, a Lutheran theologian and bioethicist at the Graduate
Theological Union in Berkeley, likewise says SCNT is potentially an
important weapon in the fight for cures.
Researchers wanting to repair a patient's heart could use that person's
own DNA in the cloning process, thereby creating “a stem cell line that
will be exactly your genetic code,” said Peters, author of “The Stem
Cell Debate” and a member of the ethics advisory committee for the
California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the agency formed by the
stem cell initiative.
Much of the opposition to embryonic stem cell research comes from
religions that regard the embryo as human life from its earliest stages.
Since extracting stem cells destroys the embryo, it becomes an issue
similar to abortion.
For these opponents, the SCNT question is even more chilling.
“We're manipulating and using human embryonic life as material for
research,” said the Rev. Thomas Berg, a Roman Catholic priest and
executive director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics in Thornwood,
N.Y. “The only intent here would be to destroy the embryo once it's been
cloned. That just opens up a huge issue.”
But Peters said the other side doesn't believe that what's in the petri
dish constitutes an individual human being. “I personally find that a
very satisfactory argument,” he said.
As for the economics, Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society,
worried that the SCNT process is so “enormously expensive” that it would
lead to rich people getting treatment and poor people being left behind.
She said she is also concerned about the health risk to women who donate
their eggs, particularly since many eggs may have to be used before a
successful procedure is achieved.
But Kalichman of UCSD said that's where informed consent comes into
play. Donors – both men and women – need to understand what is entailed
and how their donations will be used.
Stemagen acknowledged that the experiments, though successful in
producing a human embryo from adult DNA, have not resulted in extracting
stem cell lines.
Kalichman cautioned against knee-jerk reactions. “Good ethics begins
with trying to get good facts,” he said.
“Everything we do in life has risks associated with it,” he added. “We
just try to make the best possible choices.”