Efforts to Clone Humans Are Opposed in Hearing

Antonio Regalado / Wall Street Journal 29mar01

WASHINGTON -- Citing safety and ethical concerns, some members of Congress and regulators said at a hearing that they would seek to bar attempts to clone human beings.

The hearing, by the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, was called after two groups announced plans to clone a human being. Some scientists called these efforts premature and misguided because the technology isn't ready. President Bush also opposes human cloning in the U.S., the White House said.

"The president will work with Congress" on legislation, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters. "The president believes that no research -- no research -- to create a human being should take place in the United States."

Rep. James Greenwood (R., Pa.), chairman of the committee, said, "Experimentation and science have outpaced the law on the underlying issues raised by human cloning."

Officials of the Food and Drug Administration said at the congressional panel that the agency has regulatory authority over human cloning and would prevent it due to safety concerns. The FDA delivered letters to some groups early this week warning them not to proceed without approval.

Proponents of the technology told the panel that cloning could aid infertile and other couples have a biologically related child. Among those testifying was Panos Zavos, a retired University of Kentucky fertility specialist who is part of an international consortium of scientists that announced a cloning effort last January. Dr. Zavos said his effort, which is based outside the U.S., was at an early stage but could result in a cloned baby within three years.

Congress has never passed a law to regulate human cloning, although four states -- California, Louisiana, Michigan and Rhode Island -- have passed bills to ban the practice.

In the past, anticloning bills have fizzled because they have pitted ethical concerns against medical progress. The biotechnology industry and many scientists fear that bills designed to prevent cloning could impinge on important new medical techniques. One such method, known as "therapeutic cloning," involves creating a clone of a patient by hollowing out a donor egg and replacing it with a patient's cell. The resulting embryo could be dissected to provide a source of stem cells that can be turned into transplantable tissues to treat diseases. Thomas Okarma, president and chief executive officer of Menlo Park, Calif., biotechnology company Geron Corp., said his firm is exploring this treatment approach.

In January, the United Kingdom legalized this form of human cloning. The practice is also legal in the U.S., although federal law blocks public funding of any research that involves the destruction of embryos, including therapeutic cloning. The new British regulation -- the first such law passed in the world -- requires the cloned embryos to be destroyed within 14 days.

Other scientists testified that cloning techniques are still too unreliable to try in humans. Citing high rates of fetal deaths and evidence of abnormalities in cloned mice and other animals, Rudolf Jaenisch, of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., told the committee that "it would be dangerous and irresponsible to attempt human cloning."

Brigitte Boisselier, scientific director of cloning company Clonaid, said the debate over cloning is about "the freedom of science and the freedom to make personal reproductive choices." Clonaid is a company founded by the Raelian religion, a cult based in Canada whose futuristic tenets include a belief in extraterrestrials. The Raelians say they have established a cloning lab in the U.S. but haven't yet begun experimenting on human cells.

-- Gautam Naik in London contributed to this article.