A Rush to Caution: Cloning Human Beings

A Rush to Caution: Cloning Human Beings

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Few announcements have provoked more rapid public fascination and academic dismay than the news story in the Observer on February 23, 1997: Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute had successfully cloned Dolly, a sheep from a cell drawn from her (as it were) mother's mammary glands. That successful cloning clearly represented a major and somewhat unexpected technical breakthrough, and since that day further advances have followed rapidly. On July 25, 1997, the New York Times reported that a team led by Dr. Wilmut and Dr. Keith Campbell had been able to create a lamb that had a human gene in every cell of its body. That result was quickly topped by news that a Wisconsin biotech company had been able to clone three identical calves from fetal calf tissue, using processes that it claimed were more efficient and reliable than those used by the Wilmut group. My own position, which I shall develop here, is that these new developments call for no immediate legal response: Watchful waiting is far preferable to hasty or ill-conceived legislation whose unanticipated consequences are likely to do more harm than good. First, do no harm, is as good a principle now as it has ever been. But inaction leaves political actors on the sidelines, where they belong but not where they would like to be. So it was all too predictable that the first reports on cloning whipped into action a powerful coalition of the bioethical and legal professions. Various nations across the world, and several states in the United States took the first steps toward a ban on cloning human beings, and, somewhat more diffidently, research that could lead to the cloning of human beings. President Clinton responded to the whiff of crisis first by imposing a temporary ban on federal funding of cloning research, and then by asking President Harold Shapiro of Princeton University to head a distinguished review team of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) to chart the legal and political responses to cloning after taking into account the ethical and religious concerns raised about the practice. The report was duly prepared within 90 days and issued these two recommendations: • A continuation of the current moratorium on the use of federal funding in support of any attempt to create a child by somatic cell nuclear transfer [i.e., cloning]. • An immediate request to all firms, clinicians, investigators, and professional societies in the private and nonfederally funded sectors to comply voluntarily with the intent of the federal moratorium. Professional and scientific societies should make clear that any attempt to create a child by somatic cell nuclear transfer and implantation into a woman's body would at this time be an irresponsible, unethical, and unprofessional act. In addition, the NBAC recommended that any legislation prohibiting cloning should contain a sunset clause of between three and five years—an eternity in the field of biotechnology. The NBAC also urged that the regulations in question ''be carefully written so as not to interfere with other important areas of scientific research." It then enigmatically suggested that "if the legislative ban is ever lifted," the twin protections of independent review and informed consent be used to protect the human subjects who participate in preliminary research trials on cloning. From the tone of the report the "ever" suggests that "never" is the preferred position of most of the ethicists and theologians who have anxiously considered the problem. Why adopt this position in preference to watchful waiting? The usual justifications examine the various ramifications of cloning. One set of objections is quickly proving to be transitory, namely, that the practice is too dangerous to be conducted on human beings today. The second set of objections—those favoring "never"—promise a more permanent ban: a wide set of religious and ethical misgivings that promise to become more, rather than less, insistent as the techniques of cloning are improved. But "why?" is a question that should be asked in a second way: Why impose the ban now? The NBAC's report spends a good deal of time on the merits of human cloning, but it spends far less time thinking through the logic of research bans, whether induced by government decree or moral persuasion. That issue is worth a few comments here. My basic position is that our rush toward caution is not warranted by the factual information, practical doubts, religious convictions, or moral intuitions invoked to sustain it. I plan to get at this issue by taking a slight detour. I shall examine what I consider to be the basic conditions for banning any practice, and thereafter apply these standards to human cloning. I do not wish at present to commit myself to a position that cloning should be forever legal. Still less do I wish to commit myself to a view that some vision of untrammeled reproductive rights places human cloning on some preferred constitutional plane that defeats any and all government efforts to regulate or forbid the practice. Rather my point is merely one of practical philosophy: The presumption of liberty of action counsels waiting, not rushing, to impose any legal prohibitions on human cloning research.

Source Publication

Clones & Clones: Facts and Fantasies About Human Cloning

Source Editors/Authors

Martha C. Nussbaum, Cass R. Sunstein

Publication Date

1998

A Rush to Caution: Cloning Human Beings

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