BIOETHICS is a nice living. Pontificating and hand-wringing over what鈥檚 good and right follows no standards, and is subject to no accountability. The pay clearly exceeds the minimum wage, especially for those on the ethics boards of biotech companies. Better still for its practitioners, the work is often obligingly resistant to final resolution.
Take human cloning. Swiftly and painlessly, Britain decided 18 months ago that cloning embryos to make babies should be beyond the pale but that it is OK to clone embryos to develop stem cells for medical research. The US still dithers amid a dissonant chorus of ethicists, politicians and assorted kibitzers.
With the embryo-sparing religious right as his core support, George W. Bush opposes all forms of human cloning, and the US House of Representatives voted last year to make that view law. But the legislation has stalled in the Senate, where sentiment seems to favour the British model of permitting limited human cloning for research.
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Along the way bioethicists seem to have befuddled rather than led public opinion. Hopes of a clarifying opinion from President Bush鈥檚 own hand-picked bioethics advisers were dashed last week. After months of deliberation, the panel came down in favour of a four-year moratorium on all human cloning 鈥� but only just. Many favoured allowing cloning for medical research. In effect, the panel was split.
All of which is bad news for American stem cell scientists, who say the ethical fog and legal uncertainties make it hard to get on with research or win funding for it. But don鈥檛 expect too many tears among the hand-wringers and pontificators. For them, the future holds more panels, deliberations and column inches kvetching about cloning.
Last year鈥檚 rancorous debate in Congress included warnings that anything less than a complete ban would be a recipe for 鈥渆mbryo farms鈥� and human 鈥渟pare parts鈥� factories. 鈥淚 can think of few votes as important in the 26 years I have served in Congress,鈥� said Senator Orrin Hatch (Republican-Utah), who favours therapeutic but not reproductive cloning.
Were I a senator I too would vote to allow therapeutic cloning 鈥� without a moratorium. The science of stem cells is still raw and young, but if a week in politics is a long time, four years in science is an eternity. Politicians and ethicists can comfortably dawdle and debate, but Parkinson鈥檚 patients and others who see hope in stem cell research are justifiably eager for it to proceed free of irrational constraints and fears.
One such is the notion that even limited human cloning for bona fide medical research will produce the technical know-how needed to clone people en masse. In recent years the implications of reproductive cloning have been inflated to cosmic proportions by a flush of ominous prophecy and, in the US, hyperbolic political grandstanding. Anxious to distinguish it from therapeutic cloning, even the mainstream scientific community has joined the rush to demonise it. But reproductive cloning is actually of trivial importance.
Partly that鈥檚 because today鈥檚 crop of wannabe cloners appear to be more skilled at hyping than cloning. When Richard Seed, who holds a PhD in nuclear physics, announced in 1998 that he would clone himself, it triggered a monsoon of horrified denunciations. But no little Seed, or Seeds, of cloned origin have come to light. Nor has any actual evidence of clones or pregnancies emerged from 鈥淚talian Frankenstein鈥� Severino Antinori.
Last Friday, the French daily Lib茅ration led with the Rome fertility doctor apparently claiming yet again that one of his patients is pregnant with a cloned baby. Within hours, Antinori denied the story. But the opprobrium heading his way is now unstoppable. Following an earlier unconfirmed pregnancy claim, Ehab Kelada, medical director of the London Fertility Centre, said: 鈥淚f this report is true, it is shocking.鈥�
Maybe so. But in a world that abounds with many horrors 鈥� from the preventable starvation of millions of children to treatable AIDS going untreated 鈥� it is difficult to assign a high place to human reproductive cloning. Assuming it is doable, without untoward effects on the child (which is far from certain), cloning is not likely to become a popular reproductive choice.
The procedure is bound to be extremely expensive: the desktop cloner is not on the horizon. It might appeal to small numbers of the hyper-narcissistic wealthy who fancy a genetic copy of themselves. A handful of couples might turn to cloning to 鈥渞ecreate鈥� a dead child, or to avoid using donor sperm and eggs in IVF. But no amount of government regulation can keep such people away from the odd rogue clinic that will arise to service their peculiar interest. And banning therapeutic cloning because of them seems absurd.
For the rest of humanity, squeamishness about the unnatural essence of cloned reproduction will be a powerful repellent. When Antinori used IVF to help a woman of 59 have twins six years ago, it sparked widespread hallucinatory fears of a boom in geriatric mommies. That world is nowhere in sight. In dealing with an admittedly dramatic subject like reproductive cloning, the news media, science and politics merge into a single herd. Readers beware.