Opinions from around the country

In yet another move to appease the far right members of his party, President Bush last week made a vocal plea to senators to ban any further funding for cloning research.

The president’s comments put him at odds with, among others, 40 Nobel Prize winners whose letter in support of the research was released yesterday by the American Society for Cell Biology.

The opposing sides on the debate have spoken out recently in an effort to influence the Senate as it prepares to vote in the coming weeks on what sort of ban to impose on the cloning of human embryos.

President Bush, not surprisingly, has aligned himself with social and religious conservatives who hope to ban all human cloning for any purpose.

The Nobelists, and members of this editorial board as well, support a ban on reproductive cloning to produce human babies but would allow cloning of embryonic cell clusters for research and therapeutic purposes.

The crux of the debate centers around whether very early embryos are human life that should not be destroyed, or primitive clusters of cells that have not yet developed human attributes and are therefore fit subjects for research on therapies that could benefit all of humanity.

The president argued that cloning, even for research purposes, is wrong because it involves the creation of embryos that are then destroyed to derive stem cells for potential treatments. Anything less than a total ban on cloning would be unethical. Bush also maintained that it would be difficult to enforce a ban on reproductive cloning while allowing research cloning, and he called the presumed benefits of research cloning “highly speculative.”

But we believe the 40 Nobel laureates have a more realistic appreciation of the science. They argued that a ban on research and therapeutic cloning “would impede progress on some of the most debilitating diseases known to man.”

What was most disturbing about Bush’s remarks was their black-and-white, even apocalyptic tone. It was unfair and irresponsible for him to imply that those who wish to pursue therapeutic cloning that could benefit millions are traveling “without an ethical compass into a world we could live to regret.” The real regret would come if we fail to pursue some of the most promising medical research spawned by modern biotechnology.

This editorial comes from The Lantern at Ohio State University.
This column was distributed by U-Wire.

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