Reflections on cloning

Foundation: Pontifical Academy for Life.
source : Holy See.
language Original: Italian.
Copyright of the original Italian: No.
English translation: Holy See.
Copyright of the Spanish translation: No.
Date: 30 September 1997.
Checked on 12 March 2003.

Reflections on cloning

1. Historical notes

The progress of knowledge and the resulting technical advances in the fields of molecular biology, genetics and artificial insemination have long since made it possible to experiment with and carry out cloning in the plant and animal sectors.

As far as the animal kingdom is concerned, since the 1930s, experiments have been carried out to produce identical individuals obtained by artificial twin excision, modality , which can be improperly defined as cloning.

The practice of twin-splitting in animal husbandry is spreading in experimental barns as an incentive for multiple production of selected animals.

In 1993, Jerry Hall and Robert Stilmann of George Washington University published data on their own twin splitting experiments on human embryos of 2, 4 and 8 embryoblasts. The experiments were carried out without the prior consent of the relevant ethics committee and were published - according to the authors - to stir up ethical debate.

However, the news in Nature magazine - in its issue of 27 February 1997 - of the birth of Dolly the sheep, carried out by the Scottish scientists Jan Vilmut and K.H.S. Campbell with their collaborators at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, has shaken public opinion in an exceptional way and provoked statements from committees and national and international authorities, as it is a new fact, considered to be disconcerting.

The novelty of the event is twofold. Firstly, because it is not a twin cleavage, but a radical novelty defined as cloning, i.e. asexual and agamic reproduction aimed at producing individuals biologically equal to the adult individual that provides the nuclear genetic heritage. Secondly, because, until now, cloning itself was considered impossible. It was believed that the DNA of the somatic cells of higher animals, having already undergone the imprinting of differentiation, could no longer recover its full original potential and, consequently, the capacity to guide the development of a new individual.

Once this supposed impossibility was overcome, it seemed that the way was open to human cloning, understood as the replication of one or more individuals somatically identical to the donor.

The fact has rightly provoked agitation and alarm. However, after an initial period of general opposition, some voices have been raised to draw attention to the need to guarantee freedom of research and not to condemn progress; there has even been talk of a future acceptance of cloning within the Catholic Church.

So, now that some time has passed and it is in a quieter period, it is worthwhile to take a close look at what is considered a disconcerting development.

2. The biological fact

Cloning, considered in its biological dimension, as artificial reproduction, is obtained without the contribution of the two gametes; it is therefore an asexual and agamic reproduction. Fertilisation itself is replaced by the /fusion/ of either a nucleus taken from a somatic cell itself, with a denucleated oocyte, i.e. deprived of the genome of maternal origin. Since the nucleus of the somatic cell contains the entire genetic heritage, the individual obtained has - except for possible alterations - the same genetic identity as the donor of the nucleus. This fundamental genetic correspondence with the donor is what makes the new individual a somatic replica or copy of the donor.

The Edinburgh event took place after 277 oocyte-donor nucleus fusions. Only 8 were successful, i.e. only 8 of the 277 initiated the embryonic development , and of these 8 embryos only 1 was born: the sheep that was named Dolly.

Many questions and uncertainties remain about many aspects of the experiment. For example, the possibility that among the 277 donor cells used there were some "stamens", i.e. with a genome that was not fully differentiated; the role that the mitochondrial DNA may have played in the maternal egg; and many others, which, unfortunately, the researchers have not even referred to. In any case, this is a fact that surpasses the forms of artificial fertilisation known up to now, which are always carried out using two gametes.

It should be underlined that the development of the individuals obtained by cloning - except for possible mutations, which could not be few - should produce a body structure very similar to that of the DNA donor: this is the most worrying result , especially if the experiment were also applied to the human species.

It should be noted, however, that if cloning were to be extended to the human species, this replication of the corporeal structure would not necessarily result in a perfect identity of the person, understood both in its ontological and psychological reality. The spiritual soul, an essential constituent of every subject belonging to the human species, is created directly by God and cannot be engendered by parents, nor produced by artificial fertilisation, nor cloned. Moreover, psychological development , culture and environment always lead to different personalities; this is a well-known fact also among twins, whose similarity does not mean identity. The popular imagination and the aura of omnipotence that accompanies cloning must at least be relativised.

Despite the impossibility of involving the spirit, which is the source of personality, the projection of cloning to man has already led to imagining hypotheses inspired by the desire for omnipotence: replication of individuals endowed with exceptional ingenuity and beauty; reproduction of the image of deceased relatives; selection of healthy individuals immune to genetic diseases; possibility of sex selection; production of embryos previously selected and frozen to be subsequently transferred to a uterus as organs reservation , etc.

Even considering these hypotheses as science fiction, cloning proposals presented as "reasonable" and "compassionate" could soon appear: the procreation of a child in a family where the father suffers from aspermia or the replacement of a widow's dying child, which, one would say, have nothing to do with science fiction fantasies.

But what would be the anthropological significance of this operation in the deplorable perspective of its application to man?

3. Ethical issues related to human cloning

Human cloning is included in the project of eugenicism and is therefore exposed to all the ethical and legal remarks that have widely condemned it. As Hans Jonas has written, it is "in method the most despotic and, at the same time, in end, the most enslaving form of genetic manipulation; its goal is not an arbitrary modification of the hereditary substance, but precisely its arbitrary fixation in opposition to the dominant strategy in nature" (cf. Cloniamo un uomo: dall'eugenetica all'ingegneria genetica, in Tecnica, medicina ed etica, Einaudi, Torino 1997, pp. 122-154, 136).

It is a radical manipulation of the constitutive relationality and complementarity, which are at the basis of human procreation, both in its biological and in its properly personal aspect. Indeed, it tends to consider bisexuality as a mere functional residue, since an ovum, deprived of its nucleus, is required to give rise to the embryo-clone and, for the time being, a female uterus is necessary so that its development can go all the way. In this way, all the techniques that have been experimented in zootechnics are applied, reducing the specific meaning of human reproduction.

In this perspective, the logic of industrial production is adopted: the search for markets must be analysed and encouraged, experimentation must be perfected and new models must always be produced.

The woman is radically instrumentalised, reduced to some of her purely biological functions (provider of ova and uterus), while at the same time the prospect of research into the possibility of creating artificial wombs, the last step towards the production "on laboratory" of a human being, is opened up.

In the process of cloning, the fundamental relationships of the human person are perverted: filiation, consanguinity, kinship and paternity or maternity. A woman can be her mother's twin sister, have no biological father and be her grandfather's daughter. Already with FIVET there has been a confusion of kinship, but with cloning these links have been completely severed.

As in any artificial activity, what happens in nature is "emulated" and "imitated", but at the cost of forgetting that man is not reduced to his biological component, especially when this is limited to the reproductive modalities that have characterised only the simplest and least biologically evolved organisms.

It feeds the idea that some people can have total control over the existence of others, to the point of programming their biological identity - selected on the basis of arbitrary or purely instrumental criteria - which, although it does not exhaust man's personal identity, characterised by the spirit, is a constituent part of it. This selective conception of man will have, among other effects, a negative influence on culture, even outside the - numerically reduced - practice of cloning, since it will favour the conviction that the value of men and women does not depend on their personal identity, but only on the biological qualities that can be appreciated and therefore selected.

Human cloning deserves a negative judgement also in relation to the dignity of the cloned person, who will come into the world as a "copy" (even if only a biological copy) of another being. In fact, this practice leads to an intimate unease in the cloned person, whose psychic identity is seriously endangered by the real or even only virtual presence of his or her "other". Nor is it conceivable that a pact of silence could be valid, which - as Jonas already noted - would be impossible and also immoral, given that the clone was engendered to resemble someone who was "worth" cloning and, therefore, no less harmful attentions and expectations would fall on him, which would constitute a real attack on his personal subjectivity.

If the project of human cloning is intended to stop "before" implantation in the womb, trying to avoid at least some of the consequences we have just pointed out, it is also morally unjust.

Indeed, limiting the ban on cloning to preventing the birth of a cloned child would still allow cloning of the embryo-fetus, thus implying experimentation on embryos and foetuses,

and demanding its suppression before birth, which manifests an instrumental and cruel process with regard to the human being.

In any case, such experimentation is immoral because of the arbitrary conception of the human body (definitely considered as a machine made up of parts), reduced to a mere research instrument. The human body is an integral element of the dignity and personal identity of each individual, and it is not licit to use women to provide eggs for cloning experiments.

It is immoral because the cloned being is also a "man", even in embryonic form.

In addition, all the moral reasons that have led to the condemnation of in vitro fertilisation as such or to the radical rejection of in vitro fertilisation intended solely for experimental purposes can be adduced against human cloning.

The project of "human cloning" is a terrible consequence of a science without values and is a sign of the profound malaise of our civilisation, which looks to science, technology and "quality of life" as substitutes for the meaning of life and the salvation of existence.

The proclamation of the "death of God", with the vain hope of a "superman", entails a clear result : the "death of man". Indeed, it must not be forgotten that man, by denying his condition as a creature, rather than exalting his freedom, generates new forms of slavery, new discriminations, new and profound sufferings. Cloning can become a tragic parody of God's omnipotence. Man, to whom God has entrusted all creation, giving him freedom and intelligence, does not only find in his action the limits imposed by practical impossibility, but he himself, in his discernment between good and evil, must know how to draw his own boundaries. Once again, man must choose: he must decide between transforming technology into an instrument of liberation or becoming its slave by introducing new forms of violence and suffering.

It is necessary to underline once again the difference between the conception of life as a gift of love and the view of the human being as an industrial product.

Stopping the project of human cloning is a moral commitment that must also be translated into cultural, social and legislative terms. Indeed, the progress of scientific research is very different from the emergence of scientistic despotism, which today seems to be taking the place of the old ideologies. In a democratic and pluralist system, the first guarantee of the freedom of each individual is unconditional respect for the dignity of man, at all stages of his life and beyond the intellectual or physical endowments he enjoys or is deprived of. Human cloning does not meet the condition that is necessary for true coexistence: to treat man always and in all cases as an end and a value, and never as a means or a mere object.

4. In the face of human rights and freedom of research

In the field of human rights, possible human cloning would mean a violation of the two fundamental principles on which all human rights are based: the principle of equality between human beings and the principle of non-discrimination.

Contrary to what might appear at first sight, the principle of equality between human beings is violated by this possible form of domination of man over man, at the same time as there is discrimination in the whole selective-eugenicist perspective inherent in the logic of cloning. The European Parliament Resolution of 12 March 1977 strongly reaffirms the value of the dignity of the human person and the prohibition of human cloning, expressly declaring that it violates these two principles. The European Parliament, as early as 1983, as well as all laws that have been enacted to legalise artificial procreation, even the most permissive ones, have always prohibited cloning. It should be recalled that the Magisterium of the Church, in the Instruction Donum vitae of 1987, has condemned the hypothesis of human cloning, twin fission and parthenogenesis. The reasons for the inhuman nature of cloning applied to man are not due to the fact that it is an excessive form of artificial procreation, compared to other forms approved by law such as IVF and others.

As we have said, the reason for the rejection lies in the denial of the dignity of the person subject to cloning and in the denial itself of the dignity of human procreation.

What is most urgent now is to harmonise the demands of scientific research with indispensable human values. Scientists cannot consider the moral rejection of human cloning as an offence; on the contrary, this prohibition restores dignity to research, preventing its demiurgic degeneration. The dignity of scientific research consists in its being one of the richest resources for the good of humanity.

Furthermore, cloning research has an open space in the plant and animal kingdom, provided that it is necessary or truly useful for man or other living beings, while observing the rules of conservation of the animal itself and the obligation to respect specific biodiversity.

Scientific research for the benefit of mankind represents a hope for humanity, entrusted to the genius and work of scientists, when it aims at finding remedies for disease, alleviating suffering, solving problems due to insufficient food and better utilisation of the earth's resources.

To ensure that biomedical science maintains and strengthens its link with the true good of man and society, it is necessary - as the Holy Father recalls in the Encyclical Evangelium vitae - to foster a "contemplative gaze" on man himself and on the world, as realities created by God, and in the context of solidarity between science, the good of the person and of society.

"It is the gaze of one who sees life in its depths, perceiving its dimensions of gratuitousness, beauty, invitation to freedom and responsibility. It is the gaze of one who does not seek to take hold of reality, but accepts it as a gift, discovering in each thing the reflection of the Creator and in each person his living image" (Evangelium vitae, 83).

Prof. Juan de Dios Vial Correa
President

Msgr. Elio Sgreccia
Vice-President