U.S. Panel to Urge Human Cloning Ban

WASHINGTON — A special presidential commission, taking an unexpectedly tough stand, is preparing to call for a new federal law banning the creation of a human being by cloning.

The National Bioethics Advisory Commission, which met here Saturday, wants to extend to private corporate and medical laboratories the same kind of prohibition against cloning now imposed on researchers using federal dollars.

Members of the commission voiced strong sentiments against the creation of a human clone, a baby with just one biological and genetic parent.

The commission’s final report will be delivered to President Clinton on May 27. He had imposed the moratorium on federal funding while awaiting the report.

Although the commission did not complete final language for the report, it was clear there is strong support for tough, restrictive federal legislation. Rather than rely on voluntary cooperation by researchers and fertility clinics, the commission would make it illegal for anyone to make a human clone.

“It’s a safety concern” because babies created by cloning would have a high risk of “developmental defects and other physical abnormalities,” said Dr. David Cox, professor of genetics and pediatrics at Stanford Medical School.

“There is an increased physical risk--that is why I feel it is an awful idea,” Cox, a commission member, said in an interview. “I believe safety is an ethical issue.”

“We’re all agreed it shouldn’t be done. We need to make it a firm prohibition,” Dr. Eric J. Cassell, clinical professor of public health at Cornell Medical College, told his fellow panel members.

Commission members are strong supporters of continuing research in the cloning of animals, and of further work to develop medical treatments linked to gene therapy.

But they want to draw a clear line between these activities and the attempt to create a human baby that is a genetic carbon copy of just one parent.

To keep the line distinct, they are willing to take what for scientists is the rare step of calling for curtailment of the freedom of researchers.

Most federal commissions, faced with controversial issues such as this, have typically endorsed freedom for medical or scientific research while calling for procedural safeguards.

This time, however, the potential opportunities for abuse, and the intense publicity and concern over cloning, prompted a very different approach. Virtually all members of the commission, including scientists who have been quick to oppose any legislative restrictions on research in the past, are endorsing the proposed law.

Commission members include doctors, professors of ethics and religion, research scientists and a pharmaceutical company executive. Scottish researchers’ cloning of a lamb named Dolly, which grew into a healthy adult, precipitated the current highly publicized debate.

Cloning is the production of an exact genetic duplicate of a living organism.

In the normal reproductive process, an egg and a sperm fuse, combining the genetic background of two parents, to produce an embryo. The embryo becomes a third adult, combining the genes contributed by each parent.

Cloning uses only the genes from one parent. Dolly was created with the genetic material from a cell from the udder of a ewe. Her only parent was her mother.

In human cloning, the child would not be a unique combination of genes with physical and mental aspects from two people, as is the case with every human being. Instead, the child would be an identical copy, genetically speaking, of the sole parent contributing the genes.

The commission’s goal through a law is to “prohibit the first successful cloning of a human being,” said Dr. Bernard Lo, professor of medicine and director of the medical ethics program at UC San Francisco.

A key target of the proposed law would be fertility clinics, where the egg from the mother and sperm from the father are combined to produce an embryo, which is then implanted in the mother.

Commission members fear fertility clinic doctors would produce embryos using the genes from just one parent. Perhaps a billionaire wanted to replicate himself in children, or a politician wanted a child identical to herself.

“For most of us, safety is a profoundly ethical issue. Safety is a moral issue,” said the commission chairman, Princeton University President Harold Shapiro. “The chances of abnormal development in fetuses created this way is very high,” he said.

Laws barring human cloning have been adopted in Britain, Denmark, Spain, Germany and Australia.

Commission members emphasize that the ban would apply only to cloning research aimed at making a human being.

“It is critical” to continue cloning research, which is the “foundation of modern biomedicine,” Shapiro said.