Cloning debate 'hijacked' say experts

WASHINGTON, April 23 (UPI) -- The debate over cloning and related genetic biotechnologies has become muddied, and important issues have been left on the sidelines because the discourse has effectively been hijacked by competing interests, some public policy analysts believe.

Shannon Brownlee, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, believes that biotech advocates who promise that cures could come soon from research cloning, and social conservatives who say that reproductive cloning scientists will soon begin to produce and abort embryos, are both overstating the truth for their own political goals. Neither technology is mature enough to generate either outcome, she says.

"There are irresponsible distortions," Brownlee said at an April 16 forum on stem cells and cloning held by her think tank on Capitol Hill. "Both sides have a moral obligation to discuss the issue in a reasonable tone."

Currently, the biotechnology debate is centered on cloning, with the Senate expected in the coming weeks to decide whether reproductive cloning alone should be banned, or whether all cloning research should be blocked in the United States. The Senate vote on a cloning ban bill follows the passage last July of a House measure that would ban all cloning research in the United States. This bill followed a failed effort to enact a ban on reproductive cloning alone.

Think tank analysts believe that neither critics nor proponents of the research are currently willing to give up their stances and accept the middle ground consisting of a ban on reproductive cloning that would still allow medical research to continue. Each, they believe, feel it would give too much up to the other side.

Reproductive cloning research -- which seeks to produce an exact duplicate of an existing human being -- is universally abhorred by politicians on both sides of the aisle. But research cloning -- which seeks to produce human organs and possibly even body parts for transplantation and other uses -- has many potentially positive applications.

Past experiments in eugenics -- notably those in Nazi Germany -- and the horror that someone might attempt to breed bizarre creatures, such as a half-man/half-ape hybrid for labor, also remain ever-present in the debate.

Steadfast cloning critics have successfully argued that the medical research and reproductive technologies are inseparable, and have successfully tied the anti-cloning positions to arguments from the anti-abortion movement about life beginning at conception. As a result, political discussions over cloning have tended to revolve around abortion rights and anti-abortion camps, with pro-science politicians wading in wherever they can best find shelter.

"This is arguably the most important domestic policy issue," Eric Cohen, resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said at the forum. "(But) the politics of this seem strange and uncertain."

Cohen -- whose group seeks to place policy issues in the context of "Judeo-Christian" belief structure -- is one of the moralists seeking to structure this debate along ethical lines.

"It is about fundamental questions about human life, it is about our democracy and it is about the shape and changing shape of our culture," he said. "This debate will not end no matter what the Senate does in the coming weeks."

Michael Greenberg, a health care law and regulation policy analyst at the Rand Corp., says that one of the problems of debating the policy implications of cloning is that it, and other forms of genetic research, has yet to be addressed by policy analysts.

"Because these issues are new there are not many people doing empirical policy work," Greenberg told United Press International. "People are still figuring out what cloning will look like, how expensive it will be and how readily available it will be to consumers. I think at this point theologians and law professors might be more concerned with it."

This complex debate raises questions about the future of overall genetic research in this country, but some believe that framing the debate in the context of science on one side and religion at the other is too simplistic, because the issues involved go far beyond this black-and-white dichotomy.

Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and author of the recently released book "Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution," believes that genetic and biotechnology advancements show promise, though they are fraught with danger. But he believes there is a clear need to regulate a science we do not yet truly understand. This, he says, is ignored in the current, morally charged debate over cloning and genetics.

"The main thrust (of my argument) is that it is time to move on from the ethical and moral debate and talk more about regulatory processes and create some new regulatory institutions," Fukuyama told UPI.

Fukuyama says that though he supports the lesser of the two bans on federal funding for stem cell research put in place by President George W. Bush last year, he thinks that as a general rule a regulatory ban on biotechnology and cloning research would not have the intended effect, because the basic technologies are already in medical use.

For example, he says that genetic prescreening and the shaping of genetic traits in newborns is already a reality.

Instead of a ban, Fukuyama argues that broad regulations are needed that would allow the related technologies to develop, but keep their application within ethical boundaries.

"My own preference would be some kind of regulation that would direct the technology clearly towards therapeutic use more than one that would direct it towards (human) enhancement," he said. "We currently do not have an agency or institutions in place that would allow for this at this point. When you get into pre-implantation of genetic traits and face the choice of whether to impart specific characteristics to an embryo, I would think that you would want some sort of regulatory scheme overseeing those events."

Fukuyama added that instead of the current, divisive, morals-focused debate on these issues, policymakers should be discussing what regulations would be needed to ensure the proper of these technologies as they evolve.

"Nobody is talking about creating new regulations or institutions this year or next, but we have the need for reasonable discussion of what such an institution would look like," he said. "What I would like to see is regulations that would take ethical considerations into account. It is possible to design regulations to do that under a broad legislative mandate. The FDA's statues prohibit it from bringing those kinds of considerations into account."