Human cloning, whim or necessity?
Gonzalo Herranz, department de Humanities Biomedical, University of Navarra
discussion paper at seminar "Towards a Science with Conscience".
association Cultural Albores
Wyndham Old San Juan Hotel
San Juan de Puerto Rico, November 9, 2001, 8:45 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.
Reproductive cloning: risks and repugnance
Therapeutic cloning and its advertising promotion
The opinion of the people and the power of politicians
Greetings and thanks
I suppose many of us remember the day in 1997 when we learned of the existence of Dolly the sheep. The commotion caused by the news was very great in the world of public opinion. But the real shock came in the world of biological science and, in particular, in the world of bioethics.
Dolly's cloning meant several things. One, and a very important one, referred to the role played in the progress of science by the doubt about what is admitted, the revision of accepted ideas, the rebellion against the idols of the scientific tribe. Before Dolly, it was considered a proven fact that it was not possible to clone adult mammals. Cloning was a natural thing in inferior biological beings, of asexual reproduction, boringly equal to each other. It was artificial, though relatively easy to bring about, in batrachians, following the technique of transferring somatic cell nuclei into previously enucleated oocytes. Nuclear transfer became increasingly difficult and inoperative as one moved up the biological ladder. After many attempts, it had been possible to clone mice using nuclei from young embryo cells. And, in 1997, the same was also being achieved in some domestic animals. But the systematic failure of attempts to obtain clones by transferring nuclei from adult mammalian somatic cells had led to the conclusion, supported by conjecture and very rational and convincing arguments, that cloning of adult higher animals was not possible. The Edinburgh group ruined that doctrine overnight and demonstrated that the courage to question "ironclad" scientific propositions is of very high value in science.
But, apart from this collateral effect on the ethos of science that Dolly exerted, cloning is an issue that weighs heavily on its own.
Simplifying things to make them manageable, it can be said that there are two main ways of producing animal clones. One consists of splitting or cleaving embryos; the other resorts to nuclear transfer procedures.
The first is hardly worth discussing. It is achieved by simply sectioning a young embryo into parts, either by cutting it into pieces or by disaggregating the totipotent blastomeres by chemical or mechanical procedures. The embryonic fragments or separated blastomeres are then transferred to a mother's uterus for gestation. This procedure is used in veterinary medicine. It was tested for experimental purposes on human embryos a few years ago, in 1993, when Hall and Stilman reported that they had cloned human beings by embryo fission. But the ethical and scientific conditions of that study were so poor that no validity has been granted to their findings. There has been speculation about the potential interest of embryo cleavage in assisted human reproduction, but, leaving aside the serious ethical objections to the manipulation and copying of human beings, technical difficulties have held back its use.
Cloning by nuclear transfer is much more important. It is based on a complex and delicate procedure , the precise description of which would take several minutes. In a roughly schematic way, it can be described as follows: the nucleus of a somatic cell is transferred into an oocyte, thus obtaining an embryo cloned from the individual from which the transferred nucleus originates. The oocyte must have been previously enucleated, i.e. stripped of its original nucleus. The nucleus that is transferred must have undergone the necessary reprogramming. Once in the oocyte cytoplasm, the transferred nucleus continues this decisive reprogramming process, which, if carried out completely and perfectly, allows it to dictate the necessary instructions for the embryo to develop. The cloned embryo is genetically a bit special: it receives from the donor of the nucleus the vast majority of its information Genetics and will be practically a copy of it. But it receives from the oocyte donor a very reduced and peculiar inheritance - the one that directs the training of the mitochondria, the so-called mitochondrial DNA - and other things of great value, since the oocyte cytoplasm contributes, as I have just said, to complete the reprogramming of the transferred nucleus and also to direct the first steps of the embryonic development .
Since reproductive cloning can be used in different circumstances and for different purposes, it is necessary to refer to certain different types of reproductive cloning:
In reproductive cloning, the cloned embryo is placed in a receptive uterus to undergo its full development , and give rise to an individual that is an identical copy Genetics of the one that provided the transferred nucleus.
In therapeutic cloning, the cloned embryo is allowed in vitro development for a few days, after which, once it has reached the blastocyst stage, it is dissected Chemistry or immunologically to separate the internal cell mass. This, after being cultured in a long series of successive passages, gives rise to the prized stem cells, endowed with the ability to differentiate, under the effect of specific stimuli, into a great variety of types.
Finally, in paraclonation, an embryo is first produced by ordinary in vitro fertilization techniques and allowed to grow until it consists of several blastomeres. The nuclei of these blastomeres are then obtained and transferred into as many enucleated oocytes. If the cloned embryos thus obtained are transferred into receptive uteri, several identical copies of the original embryo can be achieved. Paraclonation is of interest in very special areas of research animal.
Let's move on to consider reproductive cloning in some detail.
Reproductive cloning: risks and repugnance
Since 1997, after the birth of Dolly, reproductive cloning has been applied to different species. There have not been many successes. It is relatively easy to clone small animals, mice, for example; but, although it has been possible to clone sheep, cows, goats and pigs from adult somatic cells, it must be recognized that cloning large animals is fraught with difficulties. If we move closer to man, it must be stated that, so far, attempts to clone adult monkeys have failed.
Enucleation and nuclear transfer is a strong trauma for the oocytes and they fail very frequently; the embryos that are obtained reach low implantation fees ; the issue of spontaneous abortions is very high, and the few animals that are born present a high rate of neonatal mortality or congenital anomalies that soon end their lives. It has been seen that, on many occasions, the placenta of cloned fetuses does not function properly, resulting not only in damage to the fetuses, but also in important complications for the mothers. In cloned animals that survive for some time, serious disorders of the cardiopulmonary development and immune systems, as well as premature aging phenomena, often occur. The causes of this high morbidity and mortality of cloned animals have not been identified. It is suspected that some of them are impossible to avoid, such as, for example, the diffuse damage affecting the mitochondria present in the oocyte cytoplasm, perhaps caused by their aged DNA.
Some groups of research working on animal reproductive cloning are still active due to the great biological and ecological interest of cloning species threatened with extinction and the economic incentive of producing multiple copies of animals that, subjected to biotechnological interventions, are capable of producing substances of great pharmaceutical interest (hormones, antibodies, growth factors and others).
The reproductive cloning of animals poses no special ethical problems other than those required by the human attention to be given to them.
Nor, for the moment, does human reproductive cloning pose any major ethical conflicts.
Firstly, for technical-biological reasons, in particular its extreme inefficiency.
Secondly, for legal and ethical reasons. The ethical rejection of human reproductive cloning is practically universal, unanimous. As early as 1997, following the birth of Dolly the sheep, the mere possibility of producing cloned children was roundly condemned. The Pope, Clinton, Chirac and, with them, many religious and political leaders rejected human reproductive cloning as repugnant. Even the UK Health Minister declared: "The deliberate cloning of human beings is ethically unacceptable". Numerous political, Human Rights and Bioethics institutions (the European Community Commission, the European Parliament, the committee of Europe, the World Health Organization, the World Medical association , the Pontifical Academy for Life, the French National Ethics Advisory committee , the UNESCO Bioethics committee in its Universal Declaration on the Human Genome) unanimously condemned cloning. The first additional protocol that Europe's committee added to its Convention on Biomedicine was to condemn the cloning of human beings.
Even before Dolly, in many countries, the prohibition of cloning was already present in the legislation in force or in different legislative drafts. And after Dolly, bills were introduced in other countries prohibiting cloning in humans or restricting it in animals. The congress of the United States decided, on the last day of July of this year and by a very large majority, that it is against the law to clone human embryos. And it did not do so with a small mouth: when the law comes into force, the practice of cloning, whether reproductive or therapeutic, will be a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison and fines of millions of dollars. And when the United Kingdom legislated on subject, in an opportunistic and much criticized decision, it authorized only therapeutic cloning, and stiffened the penalties for reproductive cloning.
Ordinary people are repulsed by the possibility of manufacturing human beings that are biological carbon copies of others. Only a few snobs do not share this view. They invoke far-fetched, whimsical and egomaniacal reasons of reproductive freedom to bring into the world children who have not been sired by a father and a mother, to produce a person who with respect to another sees that the normal parent-child relationship is changed to a strange human being-retarded twin relationship. Moreover, cloned children are deprived of the natural aspiration to an open and original future, because biologically they are condemned to be a copy of another already known, to have the same predispositions and traits. Even in the most open-minded and tolerant contexts, it is considered that reproductive freedom cannot forget to take into account the benefit, the interests and the safety of the unborn child.
The few who defend the licitness of reproductive cloning also adduce freedom grounds from research, which cannot legitimately be invoked in view of the disorders afflicting cloned animals. The ethical rules of research place the human being on a unique and privileged level. They establish that no experiments can be initiated on humans without first having obtained, by means of the programs of study on animals, a prudent and favorable assessment of the calculated benefits and risks: but the risks here are exorbitant.
They claim, as a last reason, that there are people who desperately wish to have their own offspring, infertile patients who claim cloning as a right, because they consider it the ultimate remedy for their lack of gametes. These are patients who deserve all our compassion, but who need to know that the fulfillment of their desire demands such an exorbitant moral price from society that they have no right to demand: to fulfill their wishes would mean undermining the most basic of human relationships, the one between parents and children.
Indeed, reproductive cloning does not seem, either ethically or biologically, very tempting. It has not been difficult to join agreement in condemning it ethically and prohibiting it legally. It has much more to do with whim than with necessity.
Therapeutic cloning and its advertising promotion
By contrast, so-called therapeutic cloning is often presented with an attractive appearance. It has been the subject of a lively social discussion in many countries. It has been proposal by national ethics committees and industry lobbies as a promising way to obtain stem cells, endowed with incalculable therapeutic potential. Thanks to intense and convincing propaganda by the mass media, we have been led to believe that it is a kind of panacea for almost all our ills.
It is not easy, because of this popularity, to get ethical criticisms of therapeutic cloning to be taken into account. Anyone who questions its unlimited promises is regarded as uninformed, or worse, as hard-hearted and contemptuous of the welfare and happiness of countless patients. The whole of society has been bombarded insistently with persuasive and promise-rich messages, and it is not easy to get the issue submitted to discussion or reviewed.
But it is good to know the truth. A few weeks ago, a British colleague, agnostic but very independent and sincere, pointed out to me that, during the year 2000, when the second millennium of the Christian era was commemorated, many of the Judeo-Christian principles that served as a foundation for public morality and legislation in nations of that religious tradition had been demolished. He observed that the ground thus leveled was being occupied by utilitarian concepts, sometimes applied with cruelty and incompetence. He offered me, as a paradigmatic example of this mutation, the discussion that took place in the House of Commons to reform the Fertilization and Embryology Act and authorize the research, practically unlimited, on human embryos, including therapeutic cloning.
This was made possible thanks to the massive propaganda that enraptured the people and, especially, their parliamentary representatives. The pressure for legislative change came from academic community. We cannot ignore that scientists have changed. Their primary interest and dominant passion is not now research to seek and discern the truth. Scientists, many of them, have become a great social power, a lobby, a gigantic economic business . They want, on the one hand, to impose on society the scientistic creed, a strong ideology that maintains that the happiness and salvation of humanity will come, not from religion, but from science. They ask us to let them do research without hindrance, that, in return, they will dump on the world the horn of plenty of ever more audacious technologies. The alliance of research with the biotechnology industry will allow the development of highly efficient programs and will bring huge economic benefits that will be shared by scientists and captains of business. Stem cell technology is a case in point.
We have been told in a thousand ways, in a somewhat shameless propaganda that tried to nullify any civil service examination, that millions of patients will be able to benefit from the research on embryonic stem cells. A Spanish researcher , speaking on television, I suppose in a slip of the tongue that he did not rectify, said that in the world there were billions of potential beneficiaries of future treatments. They repeat the same litany that we heard more than ten years ago, when our critical capacity was numbed by the incredible therapeutic possibilities of the project Human Genome. It was said then about genes, just as it is said now about therapeutic cloning and stem cells, just as it will be said tomorrow about proteomics, that within five years we will have the remedy to cure Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's, diabetes, cancer, spinal cord injuries. According to the most publicized, but openly utopian and triumphalist version, we are now relying on the stem cells of cloned embryos to repair the damage caused to our organs by age or disease and thus save mankind a huge mass of suffering. We dream that stem cell derivatives (neurons of different types, cardiac myocytes, epidermal cells, pancreatic islet cells, joint cartilage cells, and so many more) can be used to compensate for brain damage, repopulate the failing heart, cover burned skin, restore livers and kidneys in advanced failure, heal juvenile diabetes, replace cartilage in joints, and treat many other diseases. And all this, without causing rejection problems, because cloning ensures that the transplanted cells are perfectly tolerated.
And the amazing thing is that people, not excluding politicians, believe it at face value. It was moving to read in the Hansard, the UK Parliamentary Journal of December 2000 and January 2001, the professions of faith of many Commons and Lords in the immediate reality of treatments derived from the destructive research of cloned or supernumerary embryos. The most commonly used argument, almost cloned, came to say: "It is complex, it seems, to have to produce cloned embryos. It will be necessary that many women be willing to donate or sell oocytes; it will be necessary that things go well and that the nuclear transfer does not fail, that it gives rise to embryos and that these embryos grow to the blastocyst stage. Then it will be necessary to sacrifice these tiny human embryos, deserving, of course, a certain measure of respect. But my conscience forbids me to put obstacles in the way of research on human embryos: I cannot allow my moral scruples, my respect for these tiny beings, to override my duty to prevent the suffering of millions of citizens from being prolonged for a single day. The sooner we have mastered stem cell treatment, the better".
Members of Parliament were convinced by the arguments of the Minister, this time not the Minister of Health, but the Minister of Trade and Industry. The strong reason put forward by him was that the UK needed to take the lead in cloning and embryonic stem cell technologies. It did not matter that no one had critically examined the weak basis of the scientists' claims for the unlimited curative potential of cloned embryonic stem cells, nor were the economics of the treatments discussed if the new technology were to be mastered. Much less attention was paid to the question of whether it is decent to create human embryos, even if they were cloned, to consume them at research destructive. No one thought it necessary to rethink the fundamental question, left pending 16 years ago by committee Warnock, of the ethical and legal status of the embryo, nor did anyone stop to calculate the long-term consequences for society of the decision to relegate certain human beings to the status of means to be consumed in the interests of others or as mere disposable objects.
Although no one knows for sure what the practical outcome of this adventure will be result , British parliamentarians have decided by a large majority to sell the bear's skin before it is hunted.
It is worth asking: is it true that the huge mass of suffering that therapeutic cloning is intended to save mankind? In particular, who will benefit from the stem cells that can be obtained by cloning?
We cannot forget that what is characteristic, and at the same time limiting, of therapeutic cloning is precisely its clonal character, the perfect and exclusive identity Genetics between clone and clonant. This means that a clone, as such, will only serve to provide stem cells destined for the singular individual from which it originates and of which it is a copy. And for no one else.
Cloning is solipsistic, it is closed to all others. Cloning is used to guarantee absolute compatibility Genetics and immunological compatibility with the clone, but this condemns it to be irreducibly individualistic, to be a treatment only for one. This is a limitation of enormous weight.
Such a complex, improbably successful and terribly expensive procedure can only be applied to a very select clientele, made up of the few who have enough money to pay for the sophisticated materials and the complex techniques required. We cannot forget that, in the current state of these techniques, many dozens of oocytes are needed to obtain a single embryo, that it has to grow to the blastocyst stage, that there are proportionally few blastocysts from which it is possible to derive stable colonies of stem cells, and finally that we must trust that these stem cells do not have genetic aberrations, reprogramming errors such as those that make the lives of many cloned animals so precarious, and that they are capable of responding to stimuli that differentiate them into the cell types that we wish to obtain. It is a very thorny path, with failures lurking at every stage, which will determine a prohibitive cost at least during the long time it takes to optimize the techniques.
The public has not been told about these difficulties. They have not been told that therapeutic cloning is complex, elitist and expensive.
Other important aspects have not been discussed either. We do not know whether stem cells derived from cloned embryos will be beneficial and in what way Degree. When procedure is applied to patients, it will be necessary to observe with a heavy heart whether the cloned stem cells are accepted, whether they adapt to the regulatory processes of the organism, whether they are capable of surviving in an environment where the pathogenic factors that caused the disease they are intended to cure are at work, whether they will not be more or less rapidly slowed down by the same mechanisms that put the stem cells of the adult organism in a dead end, or whether they will not start to overgrow, cause an excessive effect or even give rise to tumors. We do not know many things that will have to be clarified beforehand by means of a long and slow experimental work on animals.
But there is a rush to get there soon. Despite these legal, ethical, social and biological drawbacks, some biotechnology companies are betting heavily on therapeutic cloning, because they believe that the first of them to master and patent the techniques will make a lot of money. While that day arrives, potential shareholders and future customers are bombarded with messages, more intuitive than based on reason, that we dream of the remedy of remedies. At the core of these messages is the idea, pragmatic and consequentialist, that the incalculable good sought is worth the sacrifice of an equally incalculable issue of human embryos.
But history teaches that to dream of panaceas is often to dream of things that can give us many disappointments. What is beginning to be called regenerative medicine is considered by some analysts to be the new promise land for the captains of business. They like to work unhindered to develop, as Geron and Advanced Cell, the leading firms in the field, have done, platforms on which to combine new technologies: cloning, embryonic stem cells, immune tissues against aging, and thus treat the degenerative diseases that make old age so unhappy. They follow the toughest business style, with feverish agendas, patent priority lawsuits, fierce jockeying to attract scientists, trafficking claims data, and a rather lax sense of intellectual property rights. There are weeks when the news section of Science and Nature looks like it was copied from a financial magazine.
In such a competitive climate, calls for caution go unheeded, legal obstacles are ignored. The decision of congress in the United States to ban cloning has forced companies that had chosen this line of research to modify their policy of research and development or to emigrate to find refuge in one of the biotech havens, the United Kingdom, for example. Not without having previously branded astigmatism and moral hypocrisy those who, for ethical reasons, prohibit cloning as an aggression against human dignity and, at the same time, abandon millions of patients in the hands of the well-known list of diseases, which is getting longer and longer for promotional reasons: Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, stroke, cancer, cirrhosis, diabetes, myocardial damage, osteoporosis, leukemia, multiple sclerosis: all terrible and of very high prevalence.
Commentators in scientific journals insinuated, following the banning by the United States congress of human cloning in all its forms, that a subtle operation was being prepared behind this measure, which would take advantage of the apparent defeat. The protests against the decision of the congress were, in reality, an opinion campaign in favor of the repeal of the obstacles to produce stem cells from human supernumerary embryos. Last summer, it was said that hundreds of thousands of human embryos were lying abandoned in the banks of clinics, forgotten by their progenitors. And the congress, as well as the White House, were inundated by a wave of petitions calling for the lifting of the regulatory and financial obstacles that prevent the destructive research on supernumerary embryos. The powerful stem cell lobby mobilized actresses and former First Ladies, lobbyists and political defectors to preach the excellence of embryonic stem cells and downplay the value of adult stem cells to weaken the resistance of the President and his advisors.
What's more, he set up an ambush to discredit emerging alternatives that can compete with embryonic stem cells. To understand what happened, we must briefly discuss adult stem cells.
We do not know the therapeutic capacity of embryonic stem cells derived from supernumerary or cloned embryos. Their unlimited capacity to cure remains to be demonstrated. Their potential dangers are equally unknown to us. It will be many years before they can be applied to humans. Consequently, it is professionally and ethically improper to disregard any alternative pathway.
Stem cells from adult tissues have appeared on the horizon and have caused as much surprise as expectation. It turns out that adult tissues contain stem cells endowed with biological properties similar to those of embryonic stem cells, and their mode of entry on the scene has been quite spectacular. Tissues from experimental animals were known to contain such cells. It was known that certain adult tissues (bone marrow, skin, intestinal epithelium) were capable of maintaining fees active cell regeneration throughout life, but two ideas were established as dogmas: one, that many stable tissues (nervous, muscular, for example) lacked regenerative capacity, did not have that population of cells capable of replenishing the losses that life and disease cause; and two, that these stem cells are compromised, i.e. they have the capacity to originate only cells from their own tissue.
You can imagine the surprise of physicians and scientists when they saw these two dogmas collapse. I remember the excitement with which we at department commented on a work published almost two years ago in the NEJM. We were told the story of two women with breast cancer who had to be taken to the end of the therapeutic ladder: intensive chemotherapy treatment followed by bone marrow transplantation. The donors were male. The surprise came when, after some time, it was necessary to perform a liver biopsy. It turned out that a large proportion of the liver cells in these women's possession were not originally theirs: they had the typical markers of male cells. The only reasonable explanation was to suppose that these liver cells came from stem cells taken in during the bone marrow transplant which, due to unknown circumstances, had been incorporated into the liver and adopted a completely new and changed structure.
In a short time, new and surprising findings have been gathered, especially in experimental animals, which force us to think seriously about the possibilities that can be derived from these stem cells from adult tissues, so that we must suspect that the use of stem cells from adults is a perfectly viable alternative to the use of embryonic pluripotent stem cells.
In fact, several laboratories around the world are generating promising results that suggest that, in the not too distant future, adult stem cells isolated from a patient could be expanded at laboratory and used for the regeneration of the patient's own damaged tissues. If this technology is successfully developed, we will have an effective tool for the treatment of many congenital and degenerative diseases and dysfunctions, for the development of reparative medicine.
There are, of course, many technological challenges still to be resolved. It must be demonstrated that the in vitro proliferation capacity of adult stem cells is sufficient to produce in culture the necessary issue of cells to try treatments with guarantees, i.e., without reducing their differentiation potential. The molecular characteristics of stem cells must be carefully defined in order to standardize isolation and purification protocols. Finally, it must be demonstrated in each of the diseases to be treated with these cells that, after transplantation, a stable or, at least, lasting functional improvement is achieved. These pending points have already been answered in the case of bone marrow stem cells used for hemato-oncological diseases, but there are still as many unknowns for the other types.
Curiously, however, adult stem cells that do not raise the serious moral issues involved in the destruction of embryos, cloned or left over from in vitro fertilization, have been greeted with disdain and disinterest by the interested academic community . When in the United States the campaign to persuade the House of Representatives to authorize human cloning was raging, scientific meetings were promoted to discredit the potential value of adult stem cells. News from subject that one of the most active adult stem cell researchers publicly acknowledged that she had exaggerated in her early publications the favorable prospects of her findings was widely publicized, and a very severe, almost punitive, critique was made of the work of other researchers. Nothing similar has ever been attempted with the inflation with which embryonic stem cells have been treated.
In this status came, last August, the decision of President Bush who, on the advice of Leon Kass, authorized the federal financial aid to research on embryonic stem cell strains that were already developed, but prohibited the submission of federal money to research projects involving the destruction of human embryos. The decision, Solomonic like no other, created widespread discontent. More than a few researchers made no secret of their displeasure. And many regretted that the President had failed to live up to a historic moral decision that would have placed him among the great Presidents.
Those of us who believe that embryos are human beings worthy of sincere and profound respect, who are worth the same as we are, cannot resign ourselves to the fact that they are or have been used as raw subject for the destructive research and the development of industrial processes. The intermediate solution may have been informed by political prudence, that is undeniable, but it has been an ethical mistake. It must be recognized that, on certain problems, trying to reach a compromise is naïve. It is necessary to admit that there are ethical problems that do not admit compromises, that have no solution. The real solution comes first: not to produce surplus embryos destined for withdrawal or destruction. If it is true that every cloud has a silver lining, this ethical crisis obliges everyone to seriously consider whether it is humane to create embryos and then disregard their destiny.
The opinion of the people and the power of politicians
People are not in favor of therapeutic cloning. In 1998, the Wellcome Trust did a very original and well-designed survey on the public's views on human cloning. It was not an ordinary survey , one of those where, in the street, at the moment of getting into the car, someone comes and asks you a question to which you have to answer without thinking. A small but representative group of people, sample, was selected and invited to participate. They were given printed material on the two cloning variants, invited to study it with their family and friends, to discuss it, to ask as many questions as they felt necessary, and to send in their answers after a month. The Wellcome Trust's survey concluded: "1. There is virtually no support in the UK for human reproductive cloning. 2. Many people are also very concerned about the therapeutic uses of cloning and do not trust the ability of scientists to make rules for themselves. 3. People would like scientists to produce very useful cells and organs or tissues to cure diseases, but are unhappy about how embryos are to be used for this purpose.
People in the United States are also against all forms of cloning, including so-called therapeutic cloning. A Time/CNN survey , the results of which were reported by Reuters on February 12, 2001, indicates that 72 percent of respondents "think that cloning is not justified to produce organs to save the lives of others"; 80 percent opposed reproductive cloning. Many respondents cited their religious beliefs as a deciding factor for their civil service examination.
The same happened in Canada, where the people, from agreement with a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey , are sample favorable to the production of organs for transplantation, but a vast majority of Canadians oppose the cloning of human beings.
But how is it that the rulers in the UK have C cloning, knowing that the public is against it? How that happened is a very interesting and somewhat complicated story, which deserves to be told in order to gain experience and become more determined to act with more determination in political decisions that have to do with respect for human life and dignity.
The following happened: as always when there is a problem, the Government commissioned a committee to prepare a document for public discussion . It created for this purpose in 1998, the group of work on Cloning, a group of four people all very interested in cloning and its possible benefits. By the end of the year, the group had produced the report "Cloning: Issues in Reproduction, Science and Medicine". Its conclusion was to be expected given the ideological and professional orientation of the group members: it recommended to the government that research on embryos be authorized to design procedures to reconstitute damaged organs and tissues and to treat mitochondrial diseases.
Interestingly, the document, commissioned by the Government with the purpose to "stimulate a social, broad and informed discussion ," was not presented to the general public, but was made available only to scientific, legal and clinical organizations and specialists with ethical interests.
The people were excluded: there were no representatives of the different ethical traditions on the group de Trabajo. The report was left in the hands of experts. The elitist character of the group was shown in the recommendation it made to the government: "We wish to collaborate in the necessary task of dispelling the mistrust that may exist among the public and to engage in a task of education to help overcome irrational fears and to build confidence in the applications of science".
The most curious thing about this report is that it was commissioned to group not by the Minister of Health, but by the Minister of Trade and Industry. This means that even then the commercial and industrial interests of cloning prevailed over scientific, legal, clinical or social considerations. It should not be forgotten that by then Geron Co. had taken control of PPL and the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, the centre where Dolly had been cloned.
As was later justified, the document was quietly put to sleep and not given the circulation it was intended for, because at the time the GM food crisis was raging in the UK. By January 1999, distrust of biotechnology had become very strong. And it was realistic to think that the rejection of modified soybeans and the marketing of unmarked GM foods could spread to the biotech industry. Industrialists urged the government to be cautious, and cloning was hardly mentioned again until very late in 1999.
While waiting for the weather to improve, the government set up a new committee, chaired by Dr. Liam Donaldson, the man who had solved the GM food crisis. Again, the group was a group of experts: it was composed of 12 medical professionals and Genetics, a jurist and a professor of medical ethics.
With the year 2000 came the turn of the millennium and a time of predictions and promises, of scientistic intoxication and optimistic millenarianism. It was a time of tireless talk of sensational discoveries: of genomes and stem cells and the wave of health and healing they would bring. People were worked by the media to believe that soon, thanks to project Genome and embryonic stem cells, the scourges of advanced society, the terrible diseases on the known list, would be conquered.
That was the topic of report Donaldson's choice. Interestingly the report was sent to the department of Health, which published it under the degree scroll "research on stem cells: medical progress with responsibility": a report of the group of CMO Experts examining the development possibilities of research on stem cells and nuclear transfer for the benefit of human health.
There is no more talk of cloning: only of the new technicality of nuclear transfer. The main conclusion of report was very precise and ended in utilitarian core topic : the potential advantages of creating embryos and culturing them to obtain cells for clinical use far outweigh any moral or ethical scruples that some people might express.
The document was made public in August 2000 and with many people on vacation. And, despite this being a period not very conducive to political activity, the Government immediately accepted the recommendations and conclusions of report Donaldson and sent the draft of the Act to Parliament on August 16 for discussion as soon as possible. It made it quite clear that members of Parliament were left with the fullest freedom to vote. It all went very quickly and at a time not very conducive to the discussion in depth. The members of Parliament, although they were free to vote, had little time and few possibilities to study and contrast the project bill.
First, to see if it was necessary. The report Donaldson clearly stated that "Research to create embryos by nuclear transfer is not prohibited by the 1990 Act. All that is required for cloning to be legal in the UK is for the HFEA to grant permission to the applicant. And, interestingly, the HFEA had said in 1998 that it had no objection to granting such authorization. Therefore, the new Act was unnecessary. But the 1990 Act had made reproductive cloning a crime. Since all cloning, as the Wellcome Trust's survey had shown, therapeutic cloning was unpopular, approving it under that name would have been a political blunder. It had to be made politically correct by changing the name.
Wellcome's survey had said that the language you choose when talking about scientific research has a big influence on how people answer questions. So, for example, it is much more appropriate to talk about gene therapy than genetic engineering or genetic research. Gene therapy sounds more "friendly".
The first government document spoke of cloning (reproductive and therapeutic). Clearly the difference, as the words say, is not in cloning, but in the fate of the cloned embryos. But the action of cloning is the same: some uses of it are declared abhorrent and others beneficial: the adjectives are loaded with ethical overtones, because who could object to treating terrible diseases, to providing benefits? But one conclusion was drawn from Wellcome's survey : better not to talk about cloning. The important thing is for the media to persuade people that obtaining precious stem cells is worth destroying special clumps of cells we call embryos. And that overcoming the possibility of rejection of transplanted stem cells is worth using nuclear transfer technology. It will be another year or two before therapeutic cloning disappears from circulation as an unmentionable archaism. Because, as the 1998 report of the group Cloning Task Force said, "It is clear that the term 'cloning' is a stigmatised word for many because of the inevitable association of ideas with the story in Brave New World".
In this context, talk of cloning has been increasingly avoided. Scientists interested in objectivity speak of somatic nuclear transfer. Those who are more interested in efficiency prefer to speak of directed cell cultures, of specialized cell cultures. This is what had happened with the now disused term pre-embryo, or with a cell complex no bigger than a pinhead. And it is what has happened with abortion and IVE, microaspiration or menstrual regulation, or what is happening with euthanasia and dignified death, compassionate release, withdrawal benign, euthanasic therapy, overdose prescribed in accordance with the law, and others. This is what Chesterton denounced: the rich man who steals is compassionately diagnosed as a kleptomaniac; it is enough to call the poor man a chorizo.
But the British discussion struck an insistent tone: the Act was necessary to put the UK at the forefront of stem cell technology. The U.S. is beating us to the punch. If parliament passes the Act, the UK will be back at the forefront of degree program. It was with Wilmut and Dolly. The degree program is not just against disease: it is against competitors. Patents here will be worth years of abundance. UK has to get in front of the research of regenerative medicine. "We are not debating whether or not to accept research on embryonic stem cells. Whether we like it or not, research is already being done in the USA. The medical industry is international. The question is not so much whether or not we want to fight some diseases, but whether or not we are willing to make the decisions, to make the ethical and moral sacrifices that will encourage this research here. We do not have to balance the ethical arguments in favor of embryo research against the moral risks of exploiting and destroying embryos. We have to decide whether exploiting and destroying embryos is worth more or less that our biotech industry is leaving home, worth more or less that we can keep it with us. We have to do some things that we don't like very much, but we can't let it go. The question final is whether or not we want to approve that subject from research in order to be able to compete without disadvantage in the biotech field."
At the end of the discussion, parliamentarians' attention was not focused on cloned embryos, nor even on the ethics of nuclear transfer. The discussion responded to the imperatives of industrial competitiveness. Curiously, the proposal was entrusted, again and for the second time, to the Ministry of Trade and Industry, not to the Ministry of Health.
This whole story raises very profound questions, concerning the sovereignty of the people, the manipulation of words, the expropriation of ethics. Its message is simply this: it is in our interest to participate, and for this we must make an effort to study the problems calmly, to read between the lines of what the media tell us, to know how to say with great peace and gift of tongues the perennial Christian message of what are the limits of man's dominion over the world.
The essential meaning of man's dominion over the visible world, assigned to him as a task by the Creator himself, consists in the priority of ethics over technology, in the primacy of the person over things, in the superiority of the spirit over the subject".
Thank you very much.