Asia shrugs off the West's taboos over cloning
Pastor Dale Morgan
Asia shrugs off the West's taboos over cloning*
By John Tierney
November 26, 2007
Now that biologists in Oregon have reported using cloning to produce a
monkey embryo and extract stem cells, it looks more plausible than
before that a human embryo will be cloned and that a cloned human will
be born some day. But not necessarily in the Americas or Europe.
While some critics have been fretting about the morality of stem cell
research and genetic engineering, prominent Western scientists have been
going to Asia, like the geneticists Nancy Jenkins and Neal Copeland, who
left the National Cancer Institute in the United States and moved last
year to Singapore.
Asia offers researchers new labs, fewer restrictions and a different
religious viewpoint. In South Korea, when Hwang Woo Suk reported
creating human embryonic stem cells through cloning, he justified it by
citing his Buddhist belief in recycling life through reincarnation.
His claim was later exposed as a fraud, but before that happened, his
approach was supported by the Venerable Ji Kwan, executive director of
South Korea's largest Buddhist order, the Jogye, who said research with
embryos was in accord with Buddha's precepts and urged Korean scientists
not to be guided by Western ethics.
"Asian religions worry less than Western religions that biotechnology is
about 'playing God,' " says Cynthia Fox, the author of "Cell of Cells,"
a book about the global race among stem cell researchers. "Therapeutic
cloning, in particular, jibes well with the Buddhist and Hindu ideas of
reincarnation."
Lee Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton who analyzes clashes of
spirituality and science in his book "Challenging Nature," has been
charting biotechnology policies around the world and trying to make
spiritual sense of who is afraid of what.
According to a Silver's map of the world, most of southern and eastern
Asia displays relatively little opposition to either cloned embryonic
stem-cell research or genetically modified crops. China, India,
Singapore and other countries have enacted laws supporting embryo
cloning for medical research, not reproduction. Genetically modified
crops are grown in China, India and elsewhere.
In Europe, genetically modified crops are taboo. Cloning human embryos
for research has been legally supported in England and several other
countries, but it is banned in more than a dozen others, including
France and Germany.
In North and South America, genetically altered crops are widely used.
But embryo cloning for research has been banned in most countries,
including Brazil, Canada and Mexico. It has not been banned in the
United States, but the research is ineligible for federal financing, and
some states have outlawed it.
Silver explains these patterns by dividing spiritual believers into
three broad categories. The first, traditional Christians, predominate
in the Western Hemisphere and some European countries. The second, which
he calls post-Christians, are concentrated in other European countries
and parts of North America, especially along the coasts. The third group
are followers of Eastern religions.
"Most people in Hindu and Buddhist countries," Silver says, "have a root
tradition in which there is no single creator god. Instead, there may be
no gods or many gods, and there is no master plan for the universe.
Instead, spirits are eternal, and individual virtue - karma - determines
what happens to your spirit in your next life. With some exceptions,
this view generally allows the acceptance of both embryo research to
support life and genetically modified crops."
By contrast, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, God is the master creator
who gives souls to humans and gives them dominion over soulless plants
and animals. While not all traditionalists consider an embryo to be a
human being with a soul, those who do say it is wrong for scientists to
create or destroy embryos in the course of research.
But there is no such taboo against humans' applying cloning and genetic
engineering to animals and plants. As a result, Silver says, cloned
animals and genetically modified crops have not become a source of major
controversy for those traditionalists.
Post-Christians are more worried about the flora and fauna.
"Many Europeans, as well as leftists in America," Silver says, "have
rejected the traditional Christian God and replaced it with a
post-Christian Goddess of Mother Nature and a modified Christian
eschatology. It isn't a coherent belief system. It might or might not
incorporate New Age thinking. But deep down, there's a view that humans
shouldn't be tampering with the natural world."
Because post-Christians do not necessarily share the view of an
omnipotent deity with the power to create souls, Silver says, they are
less worried about scientists' work with embryos. In places like
California, citizens have voted not only to allow embryo cloning for
research but also to finance it.
For other post-Christians, reverence for the natural world extends to
embryos, leading to alliances that might seem unlikely. When
neoconservative intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama asked the U.S.
Congress to ban embryo cloning, some environmental activists like Jeremy
Rifkin joined them.
In Germany, a Green Party leader, Volker Beck, referred to cloned
embryonic stem cell research in 2005 as "veiled cannibalism." He was
reacting to a call from Gerhard Schröder, the conservative who was
chancellor at the time, to loosen restrictions on such research.
The debate does not always focus on ethics or morality. Opponents of
genetically modified foods generally cite not religion but dangers to
ecosystems and human health, and committees of scientists try to resolve
their debates through risk analysis.
For now, scientists throughout the world say they do not even want to
contemplate cloning for reproductive purposes because of the risks to a
potential child, and opinion polls do not show much support for it
anywhere. Such a prospect is, if anything, more distant now, because
researchers are becoming optimistic about obtaining stem cells without
using embryos.
Even if human cloning becomes safe, there may never be much demand for
it, because most people will prefer having children the old-fashioned
way. But some people may desperately want a cloned child - perhaps to
replace one who died - and won't be dissuaded, no matter how many
Christians or post-Christians try to stop them. To reach this frontier,
they might just head to Asia.