Raymond Barglow is a psychologist and a political activist.
Banning therapeutic cloning would block research that could lead to
cures for many diseases. In therapeutic cloning, genetic material from
an adult cell is placed inside an egg to grow beneficial stem cells,
not to produce a baby. Therapeutic cloning would allow a patient's own
genetic material to be used to repair his or her damaged cells.
There is broad consensus in the scientific community that therapeutic
cloning could lead to remedies for diseases such as Alzheimer's and
cancer. It should be legal and regulated.
In his essay, "Why I Oppose Human Cloning," Jeremy Rifkin proposes
that his view is widely shared within the progressive community: "many
of us in the progressive left are equally opposed to both therapeutic
and full birth cloning.... Earlier this year, sixty-seven leading
progressives lent their support to legislation that would outlaw
therapeutic and full birth cloning. The signatories of the anti-cloning
petition included many of the best-known intellectuals and activists in
left circles today." In fact, the petition came from Mr. Rifkin himself
(the document became known as "the Rifkin petition"), and two of the
petition's signers, Stanley Aronowitz and Quentin Young, have since
withdrawn their support from the petition.
Some of Jeremy Rifkin's criticisms of reproductive cloning are
well taken; I do not have the space here to discuss his argument in
detail. But his campaign against therapeutic cloning (known by
scientists as Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, or SCNT, which is explained below) is not equally justified.
In the domain of biomedicine, progressives can readily identify with
Rifkin's opposition to "efforts to reduce human life and its various
parts and processes to the status of mere research tools, manufactured
products, and utilities." But despite his assertions to the contrary,
few among us can see the link he assumes between the research cloning
of embryonic stems cells for therapeutic purposes and the larger doomsday scenario that he lays out. The stem cell
issue—which is receiving a lot of attention from the national media—has
provided Rifkin with a wedge for introducing his anti-biotechnology
agenda to a wide audience at the cost of neglecting the specific
intentions and prospects of scientists working with embryonic stem cells to better understand disease processes and to develop new therapies based on that understanding.
The religious right and stem cell research
In its campaign to discredit embryonic stemcell
research, the religious right has blurred the differences between
therapeutic and reproductive cloning, creating in the popular
imagination nightmare visions of cloned babies born into brave new
worlds (evoked as well in popular entertainment like the movie Attack of the Clones).
But therapeutic cloning provides scant supplies for these science
fiction scenarios. This research is already subject to federal
regulation, does not involve significant health risks to cell donors, does not alter existing genomes, and takes place in a laboratory setting with a handful of embryonic stem cells that will not be implanted in a womb.
Our task as progressives should be to expose the way that anti-abortion
spokespersons twist the facts about this kind of research. Instead,
Rifkin has allied himself with these very forces. He rightly points out
that biomedical research needs careful ethical evaluation. And in his
book The Biotech Century,
he elaborated a fairly reasonable dialectical approach to such
research, recognizing its enormous potential for good, while pointing
out also the dangers. But now his blanket opposition to the cloning of
human embryos abandons that balance in favor of dubious assumptions and
misleading arguments. Banning therapeutic cloning would obstruct
research paths that could lead to effective remedies for major
illnesses such as childhood leukemia, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and
Parkinson's disease.
Rifkin argues that "By concentrating research almost exclusively on
magic bullets in the form of gene replacements, the medical community
forecloses the less invasive option of prevention...." This is
erroneous on two counts. First, it overlooks what may be the most
valuable result of research cloning: A better understanding of disease
processes. Researchers can take a diseased cell
from an adult (the disease in question could be cancer, cardiovascular
disease, Alzheimer's, or another disease in which genetic inheritance
or mutation plays a role) and use embryonic cloning to create a stem cell line from it. (The line's originating cells are harvested from the cloned embryo.) Studying a stem cell line of this kind—seeing how the disease develops as the stem cells differentiate—will help us understand that development and find remedies for it. For example, the way in which embryonic stem cells, which have been cloned using adult cells from an Alzheimer's patient, differentiate into brain cells can be compared with the normal formation of brain cells,
thereby providing new information that might help us cure this disease.
If SCNT research is criminalized, this entire domain of investigation
will be shut down.
Second, research of this kind needn't be counterpoised to
preventive measures (which indeed should be medicine's highest
priority, as I've argued in an essay published in Tikkun
March/April 2002). Consider diabetes for instance. Certainly we need to
address the social/environmental factors that may be contributing to
its increase over the past two decades. But anyone who has seen a child
suffering from diabetes surely hopes also that a medical remedy will be
found.
Regulation of complex technologies
Rifkin is right, however, to ask basic questions about the priorities and governance of biomedical research. Stem cell
experimentation, for example, is a complex, multifaceted enterprise
that advances at the cutting edge of scientific understanding. How can
it be made to conform to democratically-arrived-at norms of social
responsibility? How can lay persons, lacking expertise in specialized
scientific/technological domains, intelligently evaluate the research
approaches that scientists come up with?
Progressives have faced this quandary many times before—in our
opposition to the nuclear power industry, for instance. In arriving at
our judgments about the advisability of using complex technologies, we
rely a lot upon the views of authorities who are respected within
progressive/environmentalist circles—upon "our" experts, whom we take
to be more conscientious and less aligned with profit-seeking interests
than are the advocates on "the other side."
In the domain of biotechnology, which deploys methods of
cellular and molecular investigation that most of us know little or
nothing about, how are we to figure out which pathways are ethically
and politically acceptable? We may accept the guidance of people like
Jeremy Rifkin who have considerable specialized knowledge. Rifkin
himself would probably agree, however, that we cannot blindly trust the
"experts," even when they espouse values that we believe in.
Here are responses to some of the questions that have been raised about therapeutic cloning research:
Why we need therapeutic cloning
The diagram labeled "Research Cloning" illustrates the crucial
differences between two kinds of cloning: therapeutic and reproductive.
Therapeutic cloning places the genetic material from an adult cell inside an egg, in order to grow therapeutically beneficial stem cells, not to produce a baby. These cells
can be used in scientific research to deepen our comprehension of
disease origins and development, and to develop new medical therapies.
Many debilitating medical conditions are caused by cell damage. Therapeutic cloning (SCNT), could allow a patient's own genetic material to be used to repair that damage. Replacement cells—neurons, blood cells, pancreatic cells, etc.—generated from cloned stem cells
would be much less likely to be rejected by a patient's immune system,
since they would be genetically identical to the debilitated tissue
they were replacing.
Forty Nobel Laureates recently issued a statement that finds this research promising. They cite the prospect of developing cell-replacement
therapies, and also of advancing our understanding of fundamental
disease processes: "it may be possible to use nuclear transplantation
technology to produce patient-specific embryonic stem cells
that could overcome the rejection normally associated with tissue and
organ transplantation. Nuclear transplantation technology might also
permit the creation of embryonic stem cells
with defined genetic constitution, permitting a new and powerful
approach to understanding how inherited predispositions lead to a
variety of cancers and neurological diseases such as Parkinson's and
Alzheimer's diseases."
Among biomedical researchers in the United States, there is a broad consensus that the research cloning of embryonic stem cells
may lead to new remedies for severe childhood and adult illnesses that
afflict millions of people. On February 8 of this year [2002], the
National Academy of Sciences concluded that therapeutic cloning "offers
great promise for treating diseases.... Closing these avenues of
research may have real costs for millions of people who now have these
diseases."
Human Embryonic stem cells
Rifkin suggests that "few, if any, on the left oppose research on adult stem cells,
which can be taken from individuals after birth and have proved
promising in both animal studies and clinical trials. This 'soft path'
approach poses none of the ethical, social, and economic risks of
strategies using embryo stem cells." Most scientists working in this area, however, believe that adult stem cells are less promising for research purposes than embryonic ones. Embryonic stem cells
haven't been damaged by aging, and they show a much greater
plasticity—the potential for developing into a variety of specialized cells that could be used in life-saving therapies—than adult ones do. Two recent studies published in Nature
(March 13, 2002), one of them conducted at the University of Florida
and the other by researchers at the University of Edinburgh, cast doubt
on previous claims that adult stem cells
could revert to an earlier stage of development. In any event,
researchers in this domain need to study and work with both embryonic
and adult stem cells. We do not yet know which particular path of investigation will lead to useful therapies.
There is an additional and very important use of cloned embryonic stem cells in medical research that adult stem cells cannot serve. As explained above, stem cell lines that result from the embryonic cloning of diseased cells can help us better understand the inception and development of major diseases.
Will therapeutic cloning inevitably lead us onto a slippery slope to the production of cloned human babies?
No. Federal authority can make it illegal to implant a cloned embryo
into a uterus. Our model for regulatory oversight should be the English
Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990, which limits any
experimentation with embryos to the first fourteen days. It is at
fourteen days that an embryo first begins to develop the primitive
streak, the first indication of a nervous system. It is also at
fourteen days that, in all but the most extreme case, an embryo loses
the ability to split into two and become twins. The oversight mandated
by the English Act has prevented any "slippery slope" in the United
Kingdom and there is no reason to assume that a similar approach would
not work as well in this country.
Will therapeutic cloning lead to unethical incentives being offered for women's eggs, as Rifkin suggests?
The prospect of an increased market for women's eggs is a legitimate
concern. But our aim should be to regulate, not to criminalize, the
procedures whereby scientists obtain egg cells
for research purposes. Moreover, there are clearly some cases where the
concern for improper incentives or risk of egg donation would not be
relevant—when a mother wishes to donate an egg to help her child, for
example, or to create stem cells
that could be used to save her own life. If a person can agree to
participate, for example, in a dangerous malaria vaccine study to help
prevent or cure this disease, why should she be prevented from donating
eggs for similar (but much safer) lifesaving research?
Cloning should be regulated
All of the constituencies that have a stake in the benefits of this
research need to devise effective regulations for its continuation. We
agree with Jeremy Rifkin that we ought not to trust blindly the
scientific community or biotech industry. Legislative bodies—with the
participation of scientists, medical practitioners, patients' groups,
and other interested parties—need to improve already existing statutes
regarding egg donation for any purpose: in vitro fertilization,
surrogate motherhood, or therapeutic cloning. This is the democratic
way to address the relevant social and ethical concerns.
It is also important to note that by researching therapeutic
cloning, scientists hope to understand the biological properties of a
cloned egg cell that induce it to generate stem cells. Once they learn how this cell "re-programming" occurs, they may no longer need to use egg cells.
Irving Weissman, a biology professor at Stanford, compares the current debate over stem cell
research to the 1970s controversy over recombinant DNA technology,
which now produces a broad range of medicines, including cancer and
diabetes treatments. He points out that "the lives of hundreds of
thousands of Americans each year are saved or made better by such
recombinant DNA products.... I believe the kind of medical research
that can follow from nuclear transplantation will have a similar
magnitude of medical benefits."
Because of its therapeutic potential, research that clones stemcells for medical purposes deserves our support. It should be publicly funded and better regulated, not outlawed.
