Thursday, November 29, 2001

Therapeutic cloning carries benefits
Commentary by Morgan Landry
Skiff Staff

A company recently announced that it can clone human embryos, and the public backlash has been strong. However, when I examine the opponents’ positions, it becomes apparent that they misunderstood exactly what took place in the company’s lab. Their reaction demonstrates that skipping some facts can make people jump to big conclusions.

The first mistake opponents make is they assume the company is researching reproductive cloning. That is, it wants to put these embryos into a mother and create a baby. What the company wants to do is therapeutic cloning, which is growing cloned tissues and organs in a lab.

Ultimately, the research will eliminate the need for donated transplants. For example, instead of putting a heart patient on a long donation list and letting them die because there is no matching donor, the patient would donate a skin cell. The skin cell would be changed into stem cells. The stem cells would then be altered so they would grow into a new human heart. No human harvesting or waiting list would be necessary. The heart patient would have a perfectly matched heart, since it is a clone of the heart inside the patient’s body.

Therapeutic cloning research has the potential not only to help heart patients, but any patient in need of a transplant, as well as people who suffer from Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, AIDS and many other illnesses that are currently considered fatal.

Are we crossing into God’s territory with this research? This argument reminds me of the statement over the initial controversy over airplanes: “If humans were meant to fly, God would give them wings.” My response: If God did not want us to consider doing this research, He would not have given us the brains capable of doing so. Let us analyze the facts of the situation before proclaiming what God demands.

Would therapeutic cloning lead to reproductive cloning? No, because the processes involved are very different. Remember, these are not naturally occurring embryos that are created from the union of a sperm and an egg. These are artificially created embryos made from a skin cell and an egg.

The artificial embryo does not have everything necessary to develop if it was implanted in a mother. The very act of impregnating a woman with this embryo would be unethical, as it would pose grave dangers to itself and the mother. Reproductive cloning research is very different from this kind of research, and it can be accomplished without knowledge of therapeutic cloning.

There will always be some people who will say, “An embryo is an embryo, and all embryos are human beings. Therefore, it is unethical to experiment with therapeutic cloning.” This definition calls an embryo a human being before a woman becomes pregnant. That is, before the embryo attaches itself to the mother. Some embryos do not reach this stage, and other embryos attach themselves in other places, which can put the mother’s life in danger.

In my opinion, the best time to call an embryo a human being is after it has attached itself in the uterus where it can safely grow. However, I do not expect churches to accept this definition for many years. It took the Roman Catholic Church 300 years to acknowledge that Galileo was right when he said the earth orbited around the sun. I do not expect it to change its definition of a human being any time soon.

I am surprised that people have decided to oppose such a potentially beneficial technology without getting all the facts about what actually took place. If the research is banned in America, it will simply move on overseas. The benefits of this technology will change the world. The question is, will people change their minds first?

Morgan Landry is a junior computer information science and business major from Fort Worth. She can be contacted at (m.e.landry@student.tcu.edu).