Sacred body? Stem cell research and human cloning

Ecumenical Review, The, July, 2002 by Heinrich Bedford-Strohm

What are we actually talking about when we speak about cloning? The technology at the centre of the debate works like the procedure which Ian Wilmuth, of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute, used to create the famous cloned sheep "Dolly": First you remove the nucleus from an egg, then take a body cell from the person you want to clone and extract the nucleus from it. Then you inject this nucleus into the first egg cell, replacing its original nucleus. Then you stimulate this cell through electric impulses until it starts dividing as an embryo. Since the cell nucleus contains the complete set of genetic information, the developing embryo is genetically identical to the donor of the body cell. In the case of the cloned sheep Dolly, there were hundreds of failures before the procedure worked and experts say that in the case of human beings the medical risks, and the probability of "misfits", are even higher, Ian Wilmuth himself has become one of those who warn most fervently against transferring the technology which he used for animals to human beings. However, since the technology exists, one has to deal with the possibility of its use and further development for application to human beings.

Most people have an intuitive reaction against such efforts to clone human beings. But what is the ethical basis of such a reaction? Genetically speaking, cloned human beings are the same as identical twins. The intuitive reaction against cloning is, nevertheless, very appropriate because there is one major difference between identical twins and cloned human beings: while twins have come into existence as genetically identical human beings by coincidence or--from a religious standpoint, by the will of God --cloned human beings are produced by other human beings according to the latter's own personal will. Thus cloning violates the dignity of the human person because a cloned person is not an end in itself, but in its genetic design is completely predetermined (and therefore instrumentalized) by somebody else. Horrific visions of an army of genetically optimized cloned human beings, as we know them from films, are only the tip of the iceberg of the possible uses of the cloning technology. The more immediately probable uses might be, for example, desperate parents who loose a child and try to regain this child through cloning technology.

News of ongoing efforts to clone human beings has alarmed the churches worldwide. The Society, Religion and Technology Project of the Church of Scotland--to name just one institution--has been in the forefront of ethical debate on cloning since Dolly hit the headlines in 1997. Its director, Donald Bruce, has been in dialogue with the Roslin scientists since 1994. Thanks to this intensive dialogue and discussion process the Church of Scotland, in its statement in 1997, was among the first bodies in the world to call for legislation to ban human reproductive cloning. It has also consistently stressed the immense dangers of applying to human beings a procedure which has caused so many problems in animals.