c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Of all the nightmares spawned by the discovery by Scottish researchers that an apparently healthy sheep could be cloned from the genetic material of a single ewe, none was more vivid than the notion that some day soon cloned human babies would be marketed like commodities.

Just imagine: Cloning clinics, doing all that medical science and the market will allow to make the dreams of the childless come true. Just as fertility clinics now present prospective parents with psychological and physical profiles of sperm and egg donors, could the day come when there will be catalogues of clonable babies to choose from, in a variety of genetic styles and sizes?

For the moment, it’s a science-fiction vision. But fear this nightmare could one day become reality has prompted the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to recommend a new federal law banning the creation of humans by cloning.

The panel is putting the finishing touches on its inquiry into the legal, ethical, social and scientific implications of cloning. The report is expected to land on President Clinton’s desk in the next few days.

While the panel would bar fertility clinics from implanting cloned embryos into a woman’s womb, initial reports indicate its members are near consensus that research should go forward on cloning human embryos for the purposes of healing disease.

The 18 leading scientists, legal scholars, ethicists and theologians on the panel have no power to make law. That’s up to Congress and state legislatures. But their report will set the tone for an important national conversation about the moral, ethical, scientific and social implications of cloning.

Will it, however, be a civil conversation?

Already, strident voices are being raised: Anti-science demagogues who consider cloning a venture into forbidden science better left in the hands of God insist we should back away from this powerful new application of human knowledge. Infertile couples demand they be granted access to this new reproductive technology. Abortion foes fight for the rights of cloned embryos frozen in test-tube limbo. Politicians and religious leaders are using the issue to pursue any number of agendas.

Before the grandstanding begins in earnest, it’s important to understand what the Bioethics Advisory Commission would limit in the laboratory and what it would allow.

First, cloning pertains to cells, not consciousness.

A clone is a genetic twin, not a photocopy of body and soul. People have long recognized that twins, while genetically identical, each have their own unique human identity, shaped by their environment as well as their genetic legacy.

There are many things yet unknown about clones. But there is an emerging consensus among theologians and medical ethicists that like an identical twin, a clone would possess its own unique human identity. President Clinton, who proclaimed earlier this year that it is”wrong”to make”carbon copies”of people, hasn’t quite gotten this straight.

Second, while a great deal of research has been devoted to cloning human cells and tissue, scientists have yet to discover how to clone a complete human being.

At the moment, there’s a ban on federal funding of research on human cloning. A voluntary moratorium also is in effect among for-profit biotechnology companies on research to create a person in a petri dish.

There’s abundant evidence some craven medical specialists do prey on the needs and vanities of the childless. Consider the 63-year-old woman who recently gave birth via in-vitro fertilization. Or the clinicians who harvest sperm from dead men without prior permission of the deceased, at the request of loved ones anxious to produce a posthumous heir.

But so far at least, none are known to be trying to clone babies for the commercial market.

Third, the bioethics panel is poised to propose a ban on research to clone human offspring. But while commission members seek to limit those who operate on the ethical margins of the biomedical community, many also want to protect cloning research intended to improve the quality of human life.

Some on the panel are sensitive to the concerns of anti-abortion activists, who believe an embryo is a full person from the moment of conception, and that a four-celled or eight-celled or 16-celled zygote has the same human rights as a six-month-old fetus or a newborn child. They also rightfully express concern about the human byproducts of the cloning process.

Before Dr. Ian Wilmut produced the sheep known as Dolly, he created and destroyed 277 embryos, many of which had monstrous deformities. No amount of good, abortion foes argue, can justify such wanton distortion and destruction of human life.

But there is another side to this argument.

If pro-cloning forces on the panel and in Congress prevail, researchers in the public and private sector using cloning techniques to replicate genes, cells and tissues would be able to pursue their work unhampered. As a result, burn victims might one day have their damaged tissue replaced by skin cloned from their own bodies. Accident victims might be able to regenerate damaged spinal cords. Parts of damaged hearts could be replaced, without fear of rejection, by self-generated organs.

Abortion opponents would regard the use of human embryos to achieve such goals as a tragedy. But to many in the medical community, it would be a breakthrough to a new frontier of medical science.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

The last time an advisory panel of scientists tried to guide public policy occurred in 1994, when a National Institutes of Health committee recommended that certain kinds of health-related research on human embryos be allowed to go forward.

But the panel’s recommendations quickly became a battlefield on which the abortion issue was fought. Congress disregarded the scientists and instead enacted a total federal ban on such research and victims of cystic fibrosis, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes and other genetically linked ailments insist they have paid and are continuing to pay a bitter price as a result.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

The advisory commission is asking the nation to see that it’s one thing to clone for the purpose of giving birth to a human being but quite another to clone cells, organs or tissues to improve the quality of lives already being lived.

By drawing such a bright-line distinction between two very different uses of cloning technology, the commission has opened what could be a lucid and important discussion on a morally and ethically perplexing issue.

MJP END CONNELL