Stunning the country,and perhaps itself,the California electorate last fall voted for an unprecedented $3 billion in bonds to support stem cell research. With San Francisco (of course!) selected as its headquarters, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine is up and running.
California thus put itself on the cutting edge of a controversial, and often confusing, scientific inquiry.
To see how baffling the issues can be, consider first U.S. Senate Bill 658, introduced April 21 and sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Arlen Specter, R-Pa.
The bill would allow cloning of human embryos for use in research. It would exact severe criminal penalties for “reproductive” cloning, but would allow “therapeutic” cloning until the embryo is 14-days-old.
Specter, who is being treated with chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s disease, says he believes that he “may well be helped by stem cell research if it were to go forward.”
But why should “reproductive” cloning be punishable by 10 years in prison, while “therapeutic” cloning is made perfectly legal? And, why did Specter talk about stem cell research while introducing a bill on cloning?
We think advocates of cloning use purposely deceptive terms because while most people favor at least limited stem cell research, most people are against human cloning.
Some background:
There are three ways to create a human embryo. The first is by sexual intercourse. The second way is by in vitro fertilization, where the egg and sperm are introduced to each other in the laboratory.
The third is by cloning. This would involve surgically removing an egg from a woman’s ovary, extracting the nucleus from that egg, and inserting the nucleus from a cell of the person being cloned.
If the entire process worked well, the resulting genetically modified egg would have 46 chromosomes, would be a full human embryo, and might grow up into an almost identical twin (although younger) of the person being cloned.
Not surprisingly, the process of making a cloned embryo is both difficult and expensive.
The distinction between “therapeutic” and “reproductive” cloning is a sinister artifice.
Cloning is called “therapeutic” when the human embryo or growing fetus is used in experiments looking for human cures, and would be legal as long as the fetus is killed before it is born.
Cloning is called “reproductive” when the cloned embryo is implanted in a woman and a baby is born. The birth is the crime, not the cloning.
Bills to allow cloning have been sprouting like mushrooms.
New Jersey passed a bill last year making it legal to create an embryo by cloning, implant the cloned embryo in a woman, and allow gestation for nine months up to pre-birth. Legislators in Texas, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois and Washington state have introduced similar bills.
Now let’s turn to stem cell research.
Stem cell therapies have enjoyed success in human trials for treating heart disease, diabetes, and Parkinson’s and have potential for producing viable treatments.
Almost no one objects to research with “adult” stem cells, because countless all-purpose, unspecialized cells are in everyone’s bodies. As needed, our body transforms its stem cells into specialized cells, such as blood and nerve cells. And, we don’t have to be killed in the process of collecting a few of these cells.
Many are opposed, however, to the harvesting of embryonic stem cells because it requires killing the human embryo to obtain the stem cells. (President Bush limited federal funding for this practice; he did not outlaw private funding.)
But that’s not the only reason for the opposition.
Another is that experimentally treating disease with stem cells extracted from embryos so far has been associated with intractable problems, such as the development of tumors and a high immunologic rejection rate.
These drawbacks in animal testing have been so severe that experimental human treatment trials are currently deemed too dangerous.
So why do the media and legislators downplay the successes of non-embryonic or “adult” stem cell research, promote extraordinary curative claims for embryonic stem cell research, obfuscate the differences between stem cell research and cloning, and suggest everything is okay because “reproductive” cloning is criminalized?
We think a “Frankenstein Factor” is at work.
The cloning process enables almost unlimited opportunity for researchers to experiment with unborn human beings. The ultimate intent of legislation that allows “therapeutic” cloning is to open a back door to fetal farming for spare parts and to foster eugenics with genetic engineering.
Be alert.
Any legislation that allows human cloning, however it is defined, is profoundly ominous; and worthy of our best efforts to oppose.
In California, we must ensure that the recipients of huge grant monies play by the rules, with no “end run” exceptions.
Glueck, M.D., is a Newport Beach writer who comments on medical-legal issues. Cihak, M.D., of Seattle, is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute and a past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.
