The President's Narrow Morality OR Mr. Bush says, "Stop cloning around!"

Apr 12 22:13 UTC 2002

[From the New York Times, 4/11/2002 p. A30]

  President Bush and 40 Nobel Prize winners went head to head
yesterday on the controversial issue of human cloning.  The
president, in a speech, said a promising area of cloning research
should be banned as unethical.  But from our perspective the
Nobelists, who released a letter, held the higher moral ground in
focusing on the great promise of cloning for curing intractable
diseases.

  The warring views on cloning were intended to frame the debate
as the Senate prepares to vote in coming weeksk on what sort of
ban to impose on the cloning of human embryos.  Mr. Bush, siding
with social and religious conservatives, wants to ban all human
cloning for any purpose.  The Nobelists, and this page as well,
would ban reproductive cloning to produce human babies but would
allow cloning of embryonic cell clusters for research and
therapeutic purposes.  The nub of the dispute is whether very
early embryos are human life that should not be destroyed, or
primitive clusters of cells (no bigger than a pinhead) that have
not yet developed human attributes and are thus fit subjects for
research on therapies that could benefit all of humanity.

  Mr. Bush argued that cloning, even for research purposes, is
wrong because it involves the creation of embryos that are then
destroyed to derive stem cells for potential treatments.
Anything less than a total ban on cloning would be unethical, he
proclaimed, because "no human life should be exploited or
extinguished for the benefit of another."  That effectively
defined the cell clusters as human life and declared them
sacrosanct.  Mr. Bush also contended that it would be difficult
to enforce a ban on reproductive cloning while allowing research
cloning, and he called the presumed benefits of research cloning
"highly speculative."

  Our own guess is that the 40 Nobel laureates, whose letter was
released yesterday by the American Society for Cell Biology, have
a better grasp of the science.  They argued that a ban on
research and therapeutic cloning "would impede progress on some
of the most debilitating diseases known to man."  Those ailments
include Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, diabetes, cardiovascular
diseases, spinal cord injuries and various cancers and
neurological diseases, among others.  Research cloning may help
scientists develop embryonic stem cell treatments that would not
be rejected by the patient's own body. the Nobelists said.  A ban
on this important science, they warned, would send a strong
signal to young researchers that "unfettered and responsible
scientific investigation is not welcome in the United States."

  What was most disturbing about Mr. bush's remarks was their
black-white, even apocalyptic tone.  It was unfair and
irresponsible for him to imply that those who wish to pursue
therapeutic cloning that could benefit millions of suffering
humans are travelling "without an ethical compass into a world we
could live to regret."  The real regret would come if we fail to
pursue some of the most promising medical research spawned by
modern biotechnology.

response 2 of 104:

Apr 12 22:40 UTC 2002

        The problem with that is that one of the areas the "trickle down"
concept - which Bush Sr. envisioned during a particularly rough flight in Air
Force One's head - is medicine.  Initially, heart transplants were
ridiculously expensive, and only the rich could benefit from them, but
eventually they became considerably cheaper and more reliable, and members
of the general public became able to afford a reprieve from the death sentence
of incurable heart disease.

response 4 of 104:

Apr 12 23:07 UTC 2002

Almost nobody is actually evil.  Most are misguided.

response 6 of 104:

Apr 13 01:05 UTC 2002

Nice to hear Bush's wonderfully high-minded morality about exploiting
human lives for someone else's benefit, etc. etc.  Too bad about him
believing that life begins at conception and ends at birth.

response 8 of 104:

Apr 13 02:22 UTC 2002

Rane, the cell in your appendix is not a genetically unique human organism
as is a zygote.  Where do you draw the line, just out of curiosity?

response 10 of 104:

Apr 13 03:53 UTC 2002

re: "Mr. Bush, siding
 with social and religious conservatives, wants to ban all human
 cloning for any purpose."
The NYT needs to be somewhat more thorough in its reporting:
According to USA Today (7/16/01), the  Time's "social and religious
(anti-cloning) conservatives" include: "Richard Hayes, a former Sierra Club
official and supporter of abortion rights who is lobbying for a cloning ban."
"He says, 'This issue is way below the radar screens.  The only ones who have
been paying attention are the religious right and the biotech industry ...
(But) eugenics (genetic engineering) cuts through and renders invalid so many
ideologies. . . Judy Norsigian, a feminist who co-wrote the women's health
book Our Bodies, Ourselves, says cloning requires women to take potentially
dangerous drugs to stimulate egg production. 'It's not a women's issue alone,
but that is a piece of it,' says Norsigian, director of Boston Women's Health
Book Collective.

response 12 of 104:

Apr 13 13:52 UTC 2002

Re #10, and egg production:  No it doesn't, or won't for much 
longer.  Recent developments have shown that a small amount of
ovarian tissue can be made to produce eggs in vitro; you don't
need to give a woman a bunch of hormones (or won't for long),
all you have to do is get an ovarian biopsy.

This has a whole host of applications, of which cloning is only
one.  It's been proven that the ovary is the part of the female
reproductive system which stops working first; women as old as
59 have had children via embryo transfer.  If a woman decided to
freeze a bit of ovary in her teens, she'd be able to have children
through her 50's without risk of defects like Down's Syndrome.
(Headline:  Biotech Beats Biological Clock.)

response 14 of 104:

Apr 13 16:50 UTC 2002

Either that, or he's putting on his conservative act to please the 
religious right with the expectation that the ban will fail, thus 
appeasing the financial constituency.

response 16 of 104:

Apr 13 19:51 UTC 2002

It's interesting that the terms "human being" and "individual human organism"
are conflated.  You're right, Russ, that brain activity is a reasonable
benchmark by many standards for defining "human being," but a human organism
in the early stages of its development is still a distinct individual human
organism, even though it may not be a human "being," in the sense of "to be
or not to be."

response 18 of 104:

Apr 14 02:17 UTC 2002

One does not have to be religious to be against destroying human 
lives.  There is no sharp dividing line between a newly conceived fetus 
or a cloned cell in a test tube, and what it may become; a baby, a 
school aged child, eventually an adult.

response 20 of 104:

Apr 14 04:26 UTC 2002

Re #18: that's not an argument for anything. There is no shortage of
potential new zygotes. The world doesn't even need just MORE. There is
still room, here at least, for those that want to produce a baby, school
aged child, and eventually an adult: they know what to do. But that does
not attach a value to an unwanted or surplus or accidental zygote. The
value lies entirely in the decisions of the owner(s) for most of
gestation. 

response 22 of 104:

Apr 14 05:33 UTC 2002

No, as long as the parts or whole were freely donated. A zygote of a
few cells cannot experience anything, and it is just a biological
entity. There is no cruelty involved (despite your loaded phrasing).

response 24 of 104:

Apr 14 10:29 UTC 2002

re #20: There's no *need* for adult humans.  There are plenty around 
and no potential shortage.  Any street person with no friends -- and 
there are some around -- is valueless in terms of your argument.  They, 
like a fetus, can't take care of themselves but only consume resources, 
produce nothing, and no one cares about them.  Shall we then legalize 
their murder, or use in medical experiments?  I find such utilitarian 
arguments chilling, and entirely irrelevant to my views on either 
cloning or abortion.