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Human Cloning and Stem-Cell Research--Science's "Slippery Slope" [Part II]
| by |
Bert Thompson, Ph.D.
Brad Harrub, Ph.D. |
[EDITOR’S NOTE: In the “Editor’s Note” accompanying
last month’s issue of
Reason & Revelation,
I alluded to the fact that reports are “surfacing with disturbing
frequency about scientists’ planned use of human-derived stem cells,”
and that as a result I felt an in-depth analysis of this subject
certainly was warranted in these pages. In the short, one-month span
since the August issue was mailed, research on human-derived stem-cells
has become the focus of a national—no, make that a worldwide—debate. On
August 9, 2001, George W. Bush, President of the United States, made
stem-cell research the topic of his first major address to the American
people since taking office in January of this year. During that speech,
he explained that it would be his administration’s policy to support
federal funding
only for research on stem-cell lines already in
existence, rather than making government funds available for research
programs that obtained stem cells via methods requiring the destruction
of additional embryos (for example, experimentation on
soon-to-be-discarded embryos left over after
in vitro
fertilization procedures). As we will point out in this issue, and in
Part III in October, science now has taken the first perilous step on
that infamous “slippery slope.” Once again, therefore, we invite your
serious attention to these most urgent matters.]
CLONING—MIRACLE OF LIFE, OR DEATH SENTENCE?
How, exactly, does cloning work? Cloning procedures currently involve
the removal of an egg’s nucleus (which contains the genetic “blueprints”
of the cell) in order to replace it with the nucleus from either an
adult somatic (body) cell that has been “stressed” (via chemicals,
radiation, nutrient deprivation, etc.) or an embryonic stem cell. Under
normal conditions, cells go through a process known as
“differentiation,” during which the majority of the DNA
within the cell is deactivated—except for a small portion that
instructs the cell regarding its future destiny. For example, once a
cell differentiates, it is destined to become only a muscle cell, a
neuron, a red blood cell, a fingernail cell, etc. Most scientists, of
course, have no real desire to clone an entire laboratory of fingernail
cells. What they would like to be able to do is to clone
entire organisms.
But in order to do that, they must locate newly dividing cells (e.g.,
stem cells) that have not yet differentiated, or they must stress older,
fully formed cells that already have differentiated in order to force
them to return to an undifferentiated state. In cloning, the goal is to
“reset” the developmental clock of the implanted nucleus, the result
being the production of a new organism that is genetically identical to
the cell from which the genetic material was derived originally.
 |
Technique used by Wilmut, et al. to clone a sheep. Their
breakthrough involved starving body cells of nutrients, thus
interrupting the normal cycle of growth and division. In this quiescent
stage, the cell can be “reprogrammed” to function as a newly fertilized
egg (after Travis, 1997, 151:215). |
There can be little doubt that it is only a matter of time until
someone, somewhere, attempts to add humans to the list of creatures that
already have been cloned. As Michael Shermer, editor of
Skeptic magazine (and an outspoken critic of religion), wrote in his 2001 volume,
The Borderlands of Science:
“[C]loning is going to happen whether it is banned or not, so why not
err on the side of freedom and allow scientists to freely explore the
possibilities—not to play God, but to do science?” (p. 77). Waiting in
the wings are the rogue scientists who are more than willing to “freely
explore the possibilities” (and yes, even play God in the process!). In
yet another 2001 book,
The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution, Pierre Baldi asserted:
Thus, in time and with the proper technology, we will be able to clone any human being whose DNA
is available in sufficient amount and viable form.... Of all the
scenarios we have discussed, human cloning is probably the most pressing
and concrete.... [H]uman cloning is essentially available today.
...Cloning, gene therapies, advanced molecular medicine, and surgical
procedures such as organ transplantation, together with a better
understanding and control of environmental factors, can render our bodies essentially immortal (pp. 82,121, emp. added).
That idea—of potential human immortality—has not been lost on some
within the scientific community. In January 2000, Panayiotis Zavos (of
the Kentucky Center for Reproductive Medicine and
In Vitro
Fertilization at the University of Kentucky in Lexington) announced that
within eighteen months he and Italian fertility expert Severino
Antinori planned to produce an embryo—derived from human stem cells—for
implantation in a surrogate mother (see “Cloning Effort,” 2000). Their
plans to do just that are well under way.
However, in an article titled “The God Game No More” in a July 9/July 16, 2001 special double issue,
U.S. News & World Report
noted that on March 27, 2001, a formal letter from the United States
Food and Drug Administration was hand-delivered to Dr. Zavos, informing
him that any attempt on his part to clone a human might well place him
in violation of FDA regulations regarding experimental
medical procedures. In response, Dr. Zavos stated that he and Antinori
already have “set up two clandestine labs overseas” (see Boyce and
Kaplan, 2001). And, on August 7, 2001, at the National Academy of
Sciences Conference on Cloning—just two days before President Bush gave
his nationally televised speech on stem-cell research—Zavos and Antinori
announced their intention to impregnate as many as 200 women with
cloned embryos
by November 2001 (see Stolberg, 2001).
Scientists like Zavos and Antinori are being “egged on” by those who
are anxious to see—regardless of the cost in human lives—exactly what
might happen when scientists attempt to clone humans. As
Skeptic editor Michael Shermer went on to lament:
The mass hysteria and moral panic surrounding cloning is nothing more
than the historically common rejection of new technologies, coupled with
the additional angst produced when medical advances fly too close to
religion’s sun.... So that is what it really comes down to: the fear
that science is unduly infringing on religion’s turf.
Why not lift the ban on all research into cloning—including humans—and
see what happens? Let’s run the social experiment and analyze the
data.... In the borderlands between science and pseudoscience, the best
method to determine which fuzzy category a claim belongs is to test it.
Why not do that here? (2001, pp. 75-77).
Why not? Perhaps Shermer would understand “why not” if he immersed
himself in some of the latest results emerging from the laboratories of
the scientists who actually are involved in the process of cloning
animals on a day-to-day basis. For example, in a study reported in the
July 6, 2001 issue of
Science, researchers found that the
techniques themselves were not the cause of the problems they were
discovering in their cloned animals. Instead, the difficulties arose
from the fact that the actual donor cells (i.e., embryonic stem cells)
appeared to be extremely unstable in culture. During their growth and
division phases, these special cells began losing important segments of DNA
that instruct particular genes to “turn on” or “turn off.” While the
effects of these deletions were not visible outwardly, tests in which
gene expression was measured showed an entirely different story.
David Humphreys and coworkers used embryonic stem cells to provide the
genetic material that was placed into egg cells. The nucleus from these
embryonic stem cells was transferred to mice eggs and then placed into
surrogate mothers to be carried to term. The researchers found that the DNA in mice born as a result of this procedure exhibited irregular gene expression—in other words, some of their DNA
was missing. In order to confirm their suspicions that the technique
itself was not at fault, the scientists then implanted other egg cells
using stem cells from the same culture. As they suspected, the technique
worked flawlessly. It was the stem cells themselves that were unstable.
In discussing their results, Humphreys and his colleagues wrote: “Our
results indicate that even apparently healthy cloned animals can have
gene expression abnormalities that are not severe enough to impede
development to birth but that may cause subtle physiological
abnormalities which could be difficult to detect” (2001, 293:97). Dr.
Humphreys and his colleagues observed that cloning already has
been used to derive live clones in several species including sheep, cattle, goats, pigs, and mice, but only a few percent of nuclear transfer embryos develop to term. Even those clones that survive to term frequently die
of respiratory and circulatory problems and show increased placental
and birth weights, often referred to as “large offspring syndrome”
(293:95, emp. added).
This report confirmed what many already suspected—that reproductive
cloning not only is inefficient, but also may be extremely unsafe. In an
article titled “Don’t Clone Humans!” in the March 30, 2001 issue of
Science, Rudolf Jaenisch (one of the authors of the Humphreys study on cloned mice), and Ian Wilmut (who cloned Dolly), wrote:
Animal cloning is inefficient and is likely to remain so for the
foreseeable future. Cloning results in gestational or neonatal
developmental failures. At best, a few percent of the nuclear transfer
embryos survive to birth and, of those, many die within the perinatal
period. There is no reason to believe that the outcomes of attempted human cloning will be any different.
...Newborn clones often display respiratory distress and circulatory
problems, the most common causes of neonatal death. Even apparently
healthy survivors may suffer from immune dysfunction, or kidney or brain
malformation, which can contribute to death later (2001, 291:2552, emp.
added).
Jaenisch and Wilmut addressed the claims of Zavos and Antinori
specifically, and the possibility of human cloning generally, when they
wrote:
We believe attempts to clone human beings at a time when the scientific issues of nuclear cloning have not been clarified are dangerous and irresponsible. All the data collected subsequently reinforce this point of view.... If human cloning is attempted, those embryos that do not die early may live to become abnormal children and adults; both are troubling outcomes (291:2552, emp. added).
In an August 20/August 27, 2001 special double issue of
U.S. News and World Report, the magazine’s well-known editor at large, David Gergen, wrote under the title of “Trouble in Paradise”:
It took 277 embryos to make one Dolly, they point out, and that was for
a simple sheep. Think how many more will be required to make a human
and how many deformed fetuses may result. Will we see mass abortions?
Miscarriages? Human suffering? Even a monster in a laboratory?...[I]t is
troubling enough that Dolly grazes nearby. If we now turn loose her
human cousins, how can we possibly keep nature’s balance? (131[7]:80).
In this controversy, “keeping nature’s balance” apparently is on the
minds of a lot of people—scientists and non-scientists alike. In the
same issue of
U.S. News in which Gergen’s article appeared, the
editors also chimed in with an editorial of their own titled “Send in
the Clones?,” in which they wrote:
Stem-cell research, cloning, and genetic engineering—the new frontiers of science—are creating a landscape of slippery slopes where
politics, religion, science, and hope collide. The pace of discovery is
so rapid that we can’t even resolve one ethical debate before another
rears its head....
So far, mainstream scientists have opposed reproductive cloning because it’s just not safe.
Sudden abortions, stillbirths, and gross birth defects are among the
seemingly unexplainable and initially undetectable problems that arise
(see “Send in the Clones,” 2001, 131[7]:12, emp. added).
Shortly after news of Dolly’s cloning was announced in February 1997,
then-President Bill Clinton asked the National Bioethics Advisory
Commission to prepare a report for him containing recommendations on
human cloning. That report, presented to the President in June 1997,
contained six chapters. In chapter six, the Commission listed five
distinct categories of recommendations:
1. The Commission concludes that at this time
it is morally unacceptable for anyone in the public or private sector, whether in a research or clinical setting,
to attempt to create a child using somatic cell nuclear transfer.... The Commission, therefore, recommends the following for immediate action.
A continuation of the current moratorium on the use of federal funding
in support of any attempt to create a child by somatic cell nuclear
transfer.
An immediate request to all firms, clinicians, investigators, and
professional societies in the private and nonfederally funded sectors to
comply voluntarily with the intent of the federal moratorium.
Professional and scientific societies should make clear that any attempt
to create a child by somatic cell nuclear transfer and implantation
into a woman’s body would at this time be an irresponsible, unethical,
and unprofessional act.
2. Federal legislation should be enacted to prohibit anyone from
attempting, whether in a research or clinical setting, to create a child
through somatic cell nuclear transfer.
3. Any regulatory or legislative actions undertaken to effect the
foregoing prohibition on creating a child by somatic cell nuclear
transfer should be carefully written so as not to interfere with other
important scientific research....
4. ...[W]e recommend that the federal government, and all interested
and concerned parties, encourage widespread and continuing deliberation
on these issues in order to further our understanding of the ethical and
social implications of this technology and to enable society to produce
appropriate long-term policies regarding this technology should the
time come when present concerns about safety have been addressed.
5. Finally...the Commission recommends that Federal departments
concerned with science should cooperate in seeking out and supporting
opportunities to provide information and education to the public in the
area of genetics, and on other developments in the biomedical sciences,
especially where these affect important cultural practices, values, and
beliefs (see
Cloning Human Beings..., 1997, pp. 108-110, emp. added).
The report of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, which was
extensive, discussed several “domains” in regard to human cloning, not
the least of which was the safety of the procedure itself. As
evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin observed:
The serious ethical problems raised by the prospect of human cloning
lie in the fourth domain considered by the bioethics commission, that of
safety. ...It seems pretty obvious that the reason the Scottish
laboratory did not announce the existence of Dolly until she was a
full-grown sheep is that they were worried that her postnatal
development would go awry.... Ninety percent of the loss of the
experimental sheep embryos was at the so-called “morula” stage, hardly
more than a ball of cells. Of the twenty-nine embryos implanted in
maternal uteruses, only one showed up as a fetus after fifty days in utero,
and that lamb was finally born as Dolly. Suppose we have a high success
rate of bringing cloned human embryos to term. What kinds of
development abnormalities would be acceptable? Acceptable to whom?
(2000, pp. 166,167).
Abnormalities?
What abnormalities? According to Princeton
molecular geneticist Lee Silver, such occurrences very likely would be
little more than figments of our overactive imaginations. The same year
Dolly’s arrival was announced (1997), Silver authored his groundbreaking
book,
Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World, in
which—in a brazen attempt to defend human cloning—he wrote
(incredibly!): “If safety is judged by the proportion of those lambs
born who were in good health [that would be a grand total of
one—Dolly—BT/BH],
then the record is perfect (albeit a rather small sample size)” (p.
103, parenthetical comment in orig.). A small sample size indeed—
one!
Who does Dr. Silver think he is kidding? Were any other “scholar” to
make such a ridiculous claim based on a statistical set of one (is there
even really such a thing?), he would be ridiculed unmercifully in the
halls of science—by his own colleagues! In fact, as two scientists wrote
in a letter to
Science in regard to Dolly, one successful
attempt out of 277 “is an anecdote, not a result” (Sgaramella and
Zinder, 1997, 279:635). Is it any wonder that most Americans oppose
human cloning (see “Send in the Clones,” 131[7]:12), when such
irresponsible pronouncements are forthcoming from scientists?
What a difference four years—and statistical sets larger than one—make!
As we noted earlier, reproductive experts have cloned at least five
mammals. Yet even those scientists directly involved in the research are
critical of current methods and their end results. Harry Griffin is
assistant director of Scotland’s Roslin Institute, where Ian Wilmut
successfully cloned Dolly. In an interview on January 30, 2001, he told BBC News Online:
The success rate with animal cloning is about one to two per cent in
the published results, and I think lower than that on average. I don’t
know anyone working in this area who thinks the rate will easily be
improved. There are many cases where the cloned animal dies late in
pregnancy or soon after birth. The chances of success are so low it
would be irresponsible to encourage people to think there’s a real
prospect. The risks are too great for the woman, and of course for the
child. It would be wholly irresponsible to try to clone a human being,
given the present state of the technology (as quoted in Kirby, 2001, emp. added).
Unfortunately, maverick scientists like Zavos and Antinori are not
deterred. Nor are they alone. It appears that there are those “waiting
in the wings” for just the right moment to announce their own plans for
the cloning of humans. In a disturbing article titled “Today the
Sheep...Tomorrow the Shepherd?,”
Newsweek staff writer Kenneth Woodward remarked: “Science has a way of outdistancing all ethical restraints.
In science, the one rule is that what can be done will be done”
(1997, 129[10]:60, emp. added). That “one rule” is what is known among
scientists as the “technological imperative.” And it rules supreme in
many areas of science. The famed
Star Trek mantra—“to boldly go
where no one has gone before”—has taken on an entirely new meaning in
light of current reproductive technology. Pierre Baldi even went so far
as to suggest:
In my judgment, we do not have much to fear about cloning in the
short term, and we have plenty of time to think about its consequences
if we begin now. It will take quite some time and debate before the first laws are passed authorizing human cloning, and it may take some time to achieve the level of technical proficiency required for its legal practice.
It will take decades for the first human clone to become an adult, and
for us to begin to sort out the effects of nature and nurture (2001, p.
145, emp. added).
Baldi did admit, however: “Before human clones are produced, we should
ask ourselves whether it is ethical for human beings to precisely
determine the genome of another human being” (p. 144). Determining
(actually “
predetermining” would be a more accurate term) the genome of another human being is indeed no small matter.
Newsweek’s Woodward
observed: “Perhaps the message of Dolly is that society should
reconsider its casual slide toward assuming mastery over human life. Do
we really want to play God?” (129[10]:60).
IS HUMAN CLONING ETHICAL?
The specter of numerous laboratories around the country filled with
maimed, malformed, malingering human embryos that grow into “abnormal
children and adults” is not exactly the image of cloning that most
people envision when they think of cloning. Yet according to those
researchers who are on the cutting edge of the technology, that may be
exactly what we will see if we tread on this slippery slope in our
attempts to “play God.”
In an article summarizing the August 2001 National Academy of Sciences Conference on Cloning in Washington, D.C. for
Time magazine, Michael Lemonick discussed some of the potential consequences of “playing God” via reproductive cloning.
Most of the scientists who gathered in Washington earlier this month to
talk about human cloning agreed that cloning an entire human
being—besides being morally questionable—was fraught with technical
obstacles. After all, research into animal cloning has already shown
that for every apparent success like Dolly the sheep, there are hundreds of failures, including many badly deformed creatures that were usually miscarried (2001, 158[8]:56, emp. added).
Having discussed just such horrendous possibilities in his book,
The Impact of the Gene, it was hardly with a cavalier attitude that science writer Colin Tudge admitted:
But whether we like it or not, the human clone and the designer baby,
the reinvented human being, will stay on humanity’s agenda for as long
as science itself is practiced. With such power before us, we have to
ask as a matter of urgency, what is right for us to do. Some have
suggested that these new technologies raise no “new” ethical issues, a
point that largely depends on what is meant by new. They
certainly raise the ethical ante. After all, we cannot be held morally
responsible for events that we cannot control, but we are answerable for
those that we do control. In the normal course of events, we cannot
control the genetic makeup of our offspring. We do have some
influence, because we choose our mates carefully, but the process of
genetic recombination during the formation of eggs and sperm ensures
that the genetic details of our offspring are not ours to specify. But
if we clone children, or engineer their genes, then we are prescribing
their genome. Our responsibility, then, for all that befalls them, far
outstrips that of any parent. Noblesse oblige. It is too casual by far
to say there are no new issues. We must look deeper (2000, pp. 307-308,
emp. in orig.).
Indeed, we
must “look deeper”—for several reasons. We must force
ourselves to realize that once the genie is out of the bottle, we will
not be able to put it back. Science never goes backwards.
Never! In his book,
Designing Babies, Roger Gosden addressed this point when he wrote:
The march of scientific knowledge pauses from time to time, awaiting the discovery of a new theory, technique, or instrument, but it never retreats. Its discoveries can never be destroyed
like a canvas that offends or a music score that grates. Hence the fear
that an uncomfortable fact discovered today is bound to be applied
sooner or later, possibly for ill (1999, p. 17, emp. added).
Medical ethicist Leon Kass of the University of Chicago (the physician
selected by President Bush on August 9, 2001 to head the President’s
Council on Stem-Cell Research) observed: “We Americans have lived
by...the technological imperative—
if it can be done, it must be done...”
(2000, p. 105, emp. added). Do we honestly believe that we can “clone
now, but remedy the consequences later”—and somehow do it with impunity?
As long ago as 1967, in an editorial in
Science, Marshall Nirenberg of the National Institutes of Health cautioned:
Man may be able to program his own cells with synthetic information
long before he will be able to assess adequately the long-term
consequences of such alterations, long before he will be able to
formulate goals, and long before he can resolve the ethical and moral
problems which will be raised (as quoted in Walters and Palmer, 1997, p.
141).
Or, as Kass put it: “Here we surely should not be willing to risk
everything in the naïve hope that, should things go wrong, we can later
set them right” (2000, p. 105). Evolutionist and Nobel laureate George
Wald of Harvard decried the fact that
DNA technology faces our society with problems
unprecedented not only in the history of science, but of life on the
Earth. It places in human hands the capacity to redesign living
organisms. ...It is all too big and is happening too fast. So this, the
central problem, remains almost unconsidered. It presents probably the largest ethical problem that science has ever had to face. Our
morality up to now has been to go ahead without restriction to learn
all that we can about nature. Restructuring nature was not part of the
bargain. For going ahead in this direction may be not only unwise, but
dangerous (1979, pp. 127-128, emp. added).
Any way you slice it, human reproductive cloning is not only unwise and
dangerous, but patently unethical as well. Ask any knowledgeable
ethicist, Christian or otherwise, and he or she will confirm that two
important principles come into play in experimentation on human beings.
Is the Experiment to the Subject’s Benefit?
The first principle is that basic medical ethics requires the
experiment be to the subject’s benefit. Even avid cloning proponent Lee
Silver was forced to admit:
A basic principle of medical ethics is that doctors should not perform
any procedure on human subjects if the risk of harm is greater than the
benefit that might be achieved. In the case of cloning, this principle
would oblige physicians to refrain from practicing the technology unless
they were sure that the risk of birth defects was no greater than that
associated with naturally conceived children (1997, p. 103).
Is the risk greater? In the chapter he authored on “Cloning Human
Beings: An Assessment of the Ethical Issues Pro and Con” for the book,
Clones and Clones, Dan Brock answered that question in a very clear fashion: “
There is no doubt that attempts to clone a human being at the present time would carry unacceptable risks to the clone”
(1998, p. 157). How true! As things stand now, laboratory procedures
for cloning humans scarcely would benefit the cloned embryos. Ian Wilmut
and his colleagues attempted 277 fusions between donor cells and
unfertilized eggs. Only 29 of those fused cells became embryos and were
introduced into (13) ewes. Of those 29, only one became pregnant and
gave birth to Dolly. What if the same failure rate held true for the
cloning of humans? Or, for the sake of argument, suppose that somehow
the failure rate could be cut in half (in other words, out of 29 human
embryos, “only” 15 died during the process)? Would that then be
ethically and morally acceptable? It would not! With human cloning—if
the 1-2% success rate of scientists’ efforts today is any indication—the
failure rate could be staggering. Producing human embryos—with the full
knowledge in advance that many more of them will die than will live—is,
to use the words of evolutionist Gunther Stent, “morally and
aesthetically completely unacceptable” (as quoted in Howard and Rifkin,
1977, pp. 125-126).
Interestingly, at times atheists and theists alike acknowledge the
major thrust of such arguments. Evolutionist Richard Lewontin, for
example, admitted:
Of course, the technique will get better, but people are not sheep and
there is no way to make cloning work reliably in people except to
experiment on people.... Even if the methods could be made eventually to
work as well in humans as in sheep, how many human embryos are to be
sacrificed, and at what stage of their development? (2000, pp. 165-166).
As long ago as 1975, medical ethicist Paul Ramsey suggested that we
cannot even develop the kinds of reproductive technologies being
discussed here “without conducting unethical experiments upon the unborn
who must be the mishaps (the dead and retarded ones) through whom we
learn how” (as quoted in Restak, 1975, p. 65, parenthetical item in
orig.). Sir John Polkinghorne, in an article on “Cloning and the Moral
Imperative,” wrote:
An attempt to use a similar procedure to produce a cloned human person
would undoubtedly also require a large number of trials before success
was achieved and would involve similar uncertainties about long-term
consequences. In contrast to the work that led to the birth of the first
IVF baby, the procedures would be the result of
radical human manipulation and not simply the facilitating of a natural
process. Putting it bluntly, it would inevitably require the production
of “experimental human beings.” This, in itself, is morally unacceptable.
If the profound respect due to an unimplanted embryo requires that
experimentation cease at 14 days [as required by British law in
Polkinghorne’s home country—BT/BH], how would a much more extended series of experiments in utero
be ethically justifiable? These procedures might have as their intended
end a desirable purpose, such as the birth of a healthy baby who might
otherwise suffer from a severe mitochondrial disorder, but the manner in
which this had become feasible, through a sequence of experiments of
this kind, would have been ethically tainted. The end would no more
justify the means than it would, say, in the case of a fetus conceived
naturally but with the intention of providing suitable material for the
treatment of Parkinsonism in a close relative.... Not everything that can be done should be done (1997, pp. 41,42, emp. added).
Leon Kass put it another way: “The good things that men
do can be made complete only by the things they
refuse to do” (2000, p. 106, emp. added).
In addition, there is more to this matter than merely “perfecting” the
cloning method itself. As a case in point, consider the scenario that
evolutionist Mark Ridley presented in his 2001 volume,
The Cooperative Gene:
But could human cloning ever become widespread: could most, or even
all, human reproduction become clonal? At this stage, the Darwinian
answer has to be: probably not. We need sex. We may need it to clear our
harmful mutations. A sub-branch of human beings who went in for
clonal reproduction would also be signing their progeny up for a
mutational meltdown. They would undergo rapid genetic decay, as
mutations accumulated faster than they could be eliminated. I do not
know how many generations it would be before every offspring was so
loaded with genetic defects that it would be dead; the details would
depend on the exact cloning procedure, but cloning could not last long
on an evolutionary timescale...My forecast is that the clone would be sick, and destined to collapse under the burden of its own copying errors (pp. 253,354, emp. added).
Is it to the clone’s benefit to be born “abnormal” thanks to a
“mutational meltdown” that has the potential to make it into a monster
with gross birth defects? To ask is to answer. Truth be told, the
scientific facts surrounding cloning do not paint a pretty picture.
Rather than being viewed as a “miracle of life,” it may well be that
cloning should be portrayed instead as a death sentence.
Has the Subject Given “Informed Consent”?
There is a second equally important medical principle involved in the
potential cloning of people. In any experiment performed on a human, the
subject must know the risks beforehand and give “informed consent.”
[Note the important difference here between an “experiment” and a
routine medical procedure (such as surgery).] One of the saddest events
ever recorded in American medical history provides an excellent case
study in this regard. During the forty years between 1932 and 1972, the
United States Public Health Service sanctioned the so-called “Tuskegee
<$I[]Tuskegee experiments>Experiments” in which 399 poor men from
Macon County, Alabama who were known to have syphilis were studied to
determine the effects of this debilitating condition. The government
doctors in charge of the study never told the participants that they
were infected with this disease (the men were told they had “bad blood,”
and that they could be cured if they entered the research program
voluntarily). Even though the doctors knew that the disease was fatal if
left untreated, and even though antibiotics were available that could
have saved the lives of the 399 Alabamians, those men were denied access
to such antibiotics. Nor did the scientists involved ever obtain
“informed consent” from the men for their experiments, as required by
United States law.
Instead, they were patronized, prodded, and poked in what can only be
called one of the most shameful medical experiments ever perpetrated on
Americans by Americans. As a result, almost all of the men died a cruel,
agonizing death—with their tormenters recording every moment for
posterity in the name of “scientific research.” What was the rationale
offered in later years for the experiments, once the scheme finally was
uncovered? Those responsible claimed that they wanted to provide
knowledge of the disease in the hope that it might prevent the physical
degradation and death so often associated with syphilis victims. And, of
course, they wanted to secure information that could be used to slow,
or halt, the “moral degradation” associated with contracting a venereal
disease in the first place. Laudable goals, to be sure;
but the end results did not justify the means through which they were accomplished!
Perhaps it was a case such as the Tuskegee experiments that was on the mind of Lori Andrews when she commented in her book,
Future Perfect:
[U]nder the medical model, little attention is actually paid to informed consent.
This is thought to be tolerable since people seek medical services when
they already have a health problem and physicians are presumed to be
acting in the patient’s best interest by providing services.... Unlike
other areas of law, where the standards of behavior are externally
imposed, in medicine the standard of care is set by the profession
itself.... Currently, most genetic services are regulated by the
medical model. Under it, physicians are the source of information about
genetic tests (2001, pp. 23,24, emp. added).
The sad fact that some researchers within the scientific/medical
community today do not adhere to the ethical standard of informed
consent is no justification for
not obeying the law, however. Two wrongs do not make a right.
In the case of human cloning, however, the tiny embryo being produced
(and that more often than not is likely to die) could not provide
informed consent, even if the researchers involved in the experiments
actually decided to obey the law. As Kass noted:
...[A]ny attempt to clone a human being would constitute an unethical
experiment upon the resulting child-to-be. As the animal experiments
(frog and sheep) indicate, there are grave risks of mishaps and
deformities. Moreover, because of what cloning means, one cannot presume a future cloned child’s consent to be a clone, even a healthy one. Thus, ethically speaking we cannot even get to know whether or not human cloning is feasible (2000, p. 88, emp. added).
Dr. Kass’ point is well made. Even if we could perfect the technology
(a big “if,” to be sure!), that still would not alleviate the problem of
informed consent.
At every turn, then, the problem of the ethics of cloning rears its
head. Little wonder Rob DeSalle and David Lindley admitted: “We hardly
dare to think of the ethical difficulties such achievements would bring
in their wake” (1998, p. 104). And yet we
must think on these matters! As Pierre Baldi correctly observed:
Many bioethics texts share the same conservative punchline: we ought to
be extremely careful and proceed very slowly with biotechnology,
because we must preserve our notion of humanity and of who we are (2001,
p. 136).
Interestingly, President Bush echoed that same phrase—“proceed very
slowly”—in his August 9, 2001 speech to the American people on human
cloning and stem-cell research (which we will discuss at length in next
month’s installment). In fact, the feature article in the August 20,
2001 issue of
Time was titled “We Must Proceed with Great Care”
(see Gibbs and Duffy, 2001)—which was a direct quote from the
President’s televised speech when he said that after many months of
deliberation, “I have decided that we must proceed with great care”
(Bush, 2001).
President Bush was absolutely correct to urge “great care.” As Gina Kolata pointed out in her book,
Clone: “If we really want to stop human cloning, it might be argued that
any
forays in this direction are tentative steps down a slippery slope”
(1998, p. 234, emp. added). That “slippery slope” has been the topic of
much discussion since Dolly’s arrival. Roger Gosden observed: “Probably
no subject in medical science receives more critical attention from both
government and the press than reproductive biology and genetics” (1999,
p. 17). And with good reason! As Kass has reminded us:
Changes are now being considered that would improve the very germplasm,
the permanent heredity, of these “created” clones. Traits thus made
inherent would be potentially transferrable to every succeeding
generation. This goes beyond fantasizing about Bionic Man to conjuring
up the dream of Designer Man.... We have here a perfect example of the logic of the slippery slope, and the slippery way in which it already works in this area...We should allow all cloning research on animals to go forward, but
the only safe trench that we can dig across the slippery slope, I
suspect, is to insist on the inviolable distinction between animal and
human cloning (2000, pp. 128,96,103, emp. added).
We could not agree more!
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The Science of Jurassic Park and the Lost World (New York: HarperPerennial).
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Macroevolutionists
often point the proverbial finger at the laws of probability in a
pointless attempt to traverse the gaping chasms which exist in the
theory of evolution and Big Bang Theory and thereby substantiate them.
However, the gaps that exist, such as the origin of matter (cf. 
In
truth, the “problem of evil” argument is built on the foundation of
what the Bible says about God. As it is historically set out, the
“problem of evil” contends that the three premises (1) God is
all-loving; (2) God is all-powerful; and (3) evil exists, cannot all be
true. Where did these three premises originate? The third, that evil
exists, is a matter of personal experience and knowledge that virtually
all humans can know intuitively. But the first two premises, that God is
all-loving and all-powerful, are distinctly set forth in the Bible as
attributes of God. Without the biblical insistence that God is
all-powerful and all-loving, there would be no “problem of evil.” With
that in mind, it would be unfair and dishonest for the skeptic to demand
that the Christian answer the problem of evil without reference to the
Bible. Yet, that is precisely what Ehrman and others expect. They
attempt to discredit the biblical answers to the problem of evil. These
attacks against the Bible’s answer have been unsuccessful (Warren, 1972;
Miller, 2015). In fact, one of the most impressive responses to evil is
the biblical understanding of God’s work through providence. For the
purposes of this discussion, we will define providence as the way God
orchestrates His will through natural laws. This idea is contrasted with
God’s miraculous intervention in human affairs. A miracle, such as
Jesus walking on water or God’s empowering Moses to put his hand into
his cloak and it become leprous, is a recognizable overriding of certain
natural laws. God’s providence, on the other hand, is seen in cases
where God works through natural laws to accomplish His will.