To clone or not to clone?

Christian Century, March 19, 1997

Theologians, medical ethicists and public policy leaders around the world were among those who took sharp interest in news that a Scottish scientist had successfully cloned a sheep from the mammary cell of a ewe, creating a genetically identical animal without benefit of a male parent. For some the successful experiment posed no threat to the common good or religious morality. Others viewed Ian Wilmut's livestock research at Scotland's Roslin Institute as a further step in an unacceptably high-risk enterprise which meddles with God's creative work.

On March 4 President Clinton, warning scientists against "trying to play God," issued an executive order banning the use of federal funds to pay for human cloning research. "Each human life is unique, born of a miracle that reaches beyond laboratory science," Clinton said. "I believe we must respect this profound gift and resist the temptation to replicate ourselves." The World Health Organization, an agency related to the United Nations, has also stated that attempts to clone human beings should be banned. "WHO considers the use of cloning for the replication of human individuals to be ethically unacceptable," Hiroshi Nakajima, director-general of the UN agency, declared in a statement released March 11.

Vatican officials called for an outright ban on all human cloning and urged scientists not to genetically alter animal species. Southern Baptist and United Methodist leaders in the U.S. issued similar calls for a cloning ban. But other religious thinkers resisted the idea of automatically outlawing new genetic discoveries, suggesting instead a moratorium on cloning experiments until scientists and ethicists sort out the issues.

"One of the most important things people of faith must do is to get their facts straight," said Robert Russell, executive director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley, California. "You can't just take a [religious] tradition that has been worked out in centuries of cultural shift and apply it like a cookbook to a new discovery. You must be certain of the issues at stake before you go about condemning them." According to the views of many theologians and ethicists who have qualms about the cloning of humans, Wilmut's experiment could lead to an overturning of conventional ideas of motherhood, fatherhood and human identity; moreover, it raises new questions about the links between genetics and consciousness.

While it's unlikely that humans will anytime soon give birth to multiple genetic replicates of themselves, the cloning of the sheep named Dolly has added more urgency to a whole array of biomedical and moral issues, argued Lutheran theologian Ted Peters. "I m not in favor of wildcat cloning, nor do I think it should be banned forever and ever," Peters said. "But if there's sufficient reason for caution, then we can wait and hear why we should go ahead."

Banning human cloning would not prevent the nightmare scenarios of totalitarian governments harvesting squadrons of cloned commandos genetically equipped with fighting instincts. But the real nightmare scenarios, in Peters's view, involve intentional or unintentional genetic damage done by private reproductive technology clinics that would sell cloning services. "That's where the energy will be put," he predicted. "And the outcome of that is an intuitive puzzle. It's possible that we would discover that cloning would not produce permanent psychological or physical damage to children. They could be like twins or triplets, genetically identical with their own unique consciousness and identity. But we don't really know what people who are in it for profit are going to be selling."

In Russell's view, the issues around cloning are more ethical than theological will the poor as well as the rich benefit from the fruits of research, be it milk from high-yield cows or access to replacement body parts? Will humans and animals risk losing their dignity and be reduced to commodities? will the outcome benefit the common good, or fulfill the desires of an affluent few seeking immortality or the replication of a loved one?

Several ethicists agreed that human cloning is secondary to a more pressing genetic issue: the implications of human germ-line intervention--the alteration of defective genes that cause, for example, the hereditary disease cystic fibrosis. Scientists are close to perfecting techniques that would allow them to cure the disease not only in a human embryo but as a child matures to adulthood, in his or her offspring, generation after generation. The technique has the potential for great good--and massive harm. If a mistake were made in the manipulation of the gene, it would be impossible to correct in future generations. Germ-line intervention has been outlawed in Germany and several other European countries, but the U.S. has yet to develop policies for such procedures.

Rabbi Moshe Tendler, a professor of microbiology who holds a chair in Jewish medical ethics at Yeshiva University in New York, has a scientist's appreciation of how cloning and germ-line intervention cut both ways on the ethical scale. "The biblical attitude is that God says `Be fruitful and multiply, fill the Earth and master it.' But the mastery is not over man: man is the forbidden fruit," Tendler said. "Only God can master man." To permanently modify a genotype has the capacity for evil, he said, because of the great risks involved. "Any error you make is permanent, eternal," he added. Similarly, implicit in the impulse to provide the childless with cloned offspring or to extend human longevity with cloned body parts is the evil of eugenics. "Declaring one human worthy of being replicated is to also declare other humans to be less worthy."