Lies of therapeutic cloning

Antonio Pardo.
Published in La Verdad, Pamplona, November 2001.

In February 1997, Dr. Wilmut of high school Roslin in Scotland announced the success of the first successful cloning from adult animal cells. Since then, the rejection of the application of this technique to humans has been weakening. Today, it is common to find the opinion that it would be ethically acceptable to use internship for therapeutic purposes, while excluding outright the possibility of using it for reproductive purposes.

The intended therapeutic use of this technique is to treat diseases caused by degeneration of tissues or by their deficient functionality; the frequency of these diseases is growing in parallel with the increase in the age of the population in Western countries average . Although, in some cases, there may be a treatment that partially alleviates the disease (diabetes, Parkinson's), the solution final seems to involve replacing the diseased (dead or failing) cells with others that act properly, in short, transplanting cell cultures that integrate into the patient and replace the deficient function of the original diseased cells.

The cloning technique is necessary to achieve compatibility of the transplanted cells with the recipient, so that the recipient's defences do not destroy the cells that would cure him or her. In order to achieve a transplant of cells compatible with the patient, the following steps would have to be taken:

1. Take a cell from the patient and clone it, so as to obtain a human embryo (a new human being in embryonic state) genetically identical to the sick person.

2. This embryo is cultured on laboratory for 5 or 6 days, after which the cells are separated from the embryonic disc (with the death of the embryo). These cells are called "stem cells".

3. These separated cells must be treated to prevent them from ageing when they need to multiply in order to be transplanted.

4. Transform these cells into cells from subject that the patient needs (nerve cells, muscle cells, etc.).

5. Perform the transplant, without rejection and in such a way that the transplanted cells are functionally integrated in the patient.

Of all these steps, only issue 2, which has been tested on supernumerary embryos (if human life can be called "supernumerary") from in vitro fertilisation procedures, is known so far. We know how to destroy the embryos and separate their embryonic disc, and place these cells in culture. Nothing more. The recent advertisement, made by the business Advanced Cell Technology, that they have achieved human cloning is not such: they have only activated unfertilised eggs, and they have managed to make them reproduce a few times before dying. Human cloning has not yet been achieved.

This complex technique, which we have just described, is intended to solve all human diseases for which there is currently no possible solution. Faced with such potential benefits, the opinion of the media and health professionals, starting with the most liberal, is progressively leaning towards allowing experimentation on human embryos until this technique, which offers so much hope, has been perfected.

These hopes of curing humanity's degenerative diseases are false. If we look at how the technique is to be carried out, cloning would benefit only one patient, the one from whom the starting cells are taken. It would be a highly complex, extraordinarily expensive technique, which would only benefit a few millionaires who could afford to pay for it. And it would also benefit some profiteers, such as Advanced Cell Technology, who, under the guise of doing good for humanity, are basically looking for investors so that their business can thrive in an environment with a lot of skill such as the United States. The current hopeful news is a media smokescreen that hides this crude reality.

The issue becomes even clearer when one notes that the claim to cure average humanity through cloning has no impact internship, not even from subject experimental. The entire bibliography on human embryonic stem cells is reduced to average dozen articles published since 1998. None of them have any applicability internship to any patients (we have already mentioned above the state of research on all the necessary technical steps). Simultaneously, research is being carried out on stem cells obtained from the adult organism (in which they exist, and apparently much more abundantly than was thought a few years ago), with which clinical experiments have already been carried out, and from which there have already been some cures such as result.

Why then the determination to destroy human embryos, generated in an unnatural way to boot? Again, the explanation for this behaviour is Economics: it is expected that, if the same thing happens as in the 1980s with manipulation Genetics, although these techniques are still in their infancy, they will yield huge economic benefits within a decade or two. But in order to start such a promising business, it is necessary to break down the ethical barriers that prevent its development; it is therefore a matter of singing the praises of all possible cures and preliminary results, and of arguing that in any case it is only a matter of destroying a few embryos (false, many thousands will die) for the benefit of the whole of humanity (false, only a few rich people).

Although the murky issue of economic interests and the lack of scientific soundness of "therapeutic" cloning would be enough to shelve it, its main problem does not lie there, but in the fact that we are playing with human lives (embryonic, but human nonetheless) that will be created to be destroyed for the sake of science (i.e. the economic power of the powerful), and it will never be ethically correct, nor indeed Christian, to use human life as a mere means to whatever end.