World controversy on cloning based on ignorance, hype

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): It's August, traditionally the famine month for hard news, when the duplicitous and the deranged finally get their 15 minutes of fame in the mass media. But who would have expected the National Academy of Sciences to play a prominent role in the process?

Last Tuesday in Washington, an international conference sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences to examine ethical issues in human cloning gave a full day to the inflated claims of Severino Antinori, Panayiotis Michael Zavos, and Brigitte Boisselier. Free speech is important, but if the organizers thought that giving these three people a high-profile international platform would advance public understanding of the arguments for and against the cloning of human cells, they are hopelessly naive about the media.

Dr. Antinori, Zavos and Boisselier are dedicated publicity- seekers operating on the lunatic fringe of the cloning business. Zavos, who runs an infertility clinic in Lexington, Kentucky, said that he and Antinori plan to start cloning human beings by November. The press dutifully made that the headline story.

Antinori, who has been warned that he may lose the right to practice in his native Italy by the Italian medical authorities, recently claimed that he has 200 women volunteers ready to receive cloned human embryos, and would perform the implants on a ship in international waters if he can't find a country that will let him go ahead. That got into all the stories too.

And Brigitte Boisselier, director of the Bahamas-based Clonaid company and a follower of the Raelian religious cult which believes that cloning is a path to immortality, declared that she was "advancing" on human cloning in a country she would not name. (Rael is a French guru by comparison to whom even L. Ron Hubbard would not seem a cynical fraud). If you take Boisselier's claims seriously, you should not be allowed out alone, but the world's media predictably made a meal of them.

At a time when a moral panic about cloning is sweeping the non-scientific world, the National Academy of Sciences has let these bizarre people present themselves as the chief advocates of the pro-cloning case. The Three Stooges would have done a better job, and one almost suspects that the conference organizers were deliberately loading the dice against the pro-cloning argument. Or perhaps they were just innocent in the ways of the media, but they have done serious damage nevertheless.

Legitimate medical research using human cloning techniques is already at risk in the United States, where the House of Representatives passed the Human Cloning Prohibition Act last month, imposing prison terms of up to 10 years and huge fines for any experiments in the field. The Senate rejected a comparable measure in 1998, but in the current hysteria it could be stampeded into upholding the House's ignorant new law.

Japan adopted a law quite like the current U.S. legislation last November, and most European countries have already banned research using human cloning techniques. Canada is considering a blanket ban, and Russia recently imposed a five-year moratorium on cloning research. On Aug. 8 France and Germany even asked the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to put the question of a universal ban on the agenda of the UN General Assembly's next meeting in September.

Only Britain and Israel have had the wit to make a clear distinction between reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning. Reproductive cloning is an entirely unproven technique in which embryos containing the DNA of living or dead people would be created, implanted in somebody's womb, and eventually born as new human beings genetically identical to existing ones. This is what Antinori, Boisselier and Zavos are pretending they will do, and it fully warrants the label of "Frankenstein science".

Therapeutic cloning, on the other hand, is a technique in which pre-embryonic tissue cloned from human donors who are suffering from a variety of diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and diabetes would be used to produce stem cells. Medical researchers think that these stem cells might then be induced to grow into the kind of healthy cells that are needed and injected back into the original donor without risk of rejection (since they have the donor's own DNA), thus curing otherwise fatal illnesses).

Some recent research suggests that therapeutic cloning may not be the only way to get stem cells with matching DNA, as it may be possible to trick the adult human body into producing new stem cells -- but it is foolish to close the door on this promising technique by premature legislative bans. Nor does that mean we must also leave the door open to reproductive cloning. The British legislation last January neatly solved that issue by limiting researchers to using human blastocytes (the pre- embryonic stage when the cells are merely an undifferentiated sphere) that are no more than 14 days old.

There will remain the objections of religious conservatives who believe that even blastocytes that have never been implanted in a womb deserve the same legal protection as living human beings. But there are few countries where their votes alone would bring about a ban on therapeutic cloning.

It is the panic engendered by the advocates of reproductive cloning, and the confusion between the two, that is bringing about the current wave of rejection, and the National Academy of Sciences has contributed greatly to the confusion. The British bio-technology industry owes it a vote of thanks, as if things go on in this way Britain may soon be the only large developed country where this important research is not banned.