Caution better than ignorance

An astonishing amount of nonsense has been raised concerning the prospects of human cloning since Dolly the sheep burst on the genetic scene late last month. Discussions of cloning factories, transplant farms and other ghastly scenarios have assumed that a society that permits making a genetic copy of someone or something will automatically be willing to go ahead and create virtual human robots with no rights of any kind. Other scenarios ignore that a cloned embryo would still have to be carried full term in a womb like a normal pregnancy, not hatched in assembly line jars like an Aldous Huxley-style factory.

But Dolly's creator, Wilmut, has sparked controversy. The question now is no longer whether cloning is possible or whether someday we will have to face the possibility of knowing how to do it. Clearly, someday, somebody will know. And since regulation of human reproduction can only go so far, at some point someone, somewhere, may clone a human being. But that is no reason for everyone else to abandon all efforts at drawing the line or to assume that cloning is so new and bizarre that logic and traditional moral distinctions cannot be brought to bear.

Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health, broke what had been an uninterrupted parade of predictions of doomsday. He pointed out that there might actually be types of human suffering that cloning could alleviate and that overreaction to the scarier aspects of cloning could needlessly block a full understanding of the possibilities as well as the dangers.

Since then, others have urged the distinction between a premature and ill-advised ban on research and a later, more considered ban or regulation on the procedures that research may ultimately turn up. They are right. Even if the dangers of cloning prove overwhelming, open-eyed caution is a better defense against them than determined ignorance.

-- The Washington Post