PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 13, 1998 (UPI) -- Most proposed bans on human cloning would still leave plenty of legal loopholes for Richard Seed or other scientific mavericks who want to make carbon copies of people, says a legal expert.
Seven proposed bills in Congress and the 20 bills pending in states suffer from drafting infirmities, said Lori Andrews, a professor of law at the Chicago-Kent College of Law and an expert in the legal issues surrounding reproductive technologies.
Andrews was speaking today at a press conference on cloning at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Philadelphia. She said even if the Republican's permanent ban on cloning embryos had not been voted down this week in Senate, there would still be ways around it for a determined cloner and his lawyers.
Seven state laws, for example, specifically ban the creation of a genetically identical individual. Cloning involves the transfer of the nucleus of one cell, which contains all of the genetic instructions for the creation of an individual, into a donor egg, from another individual. Then the final step is implantation into a uterus, and it's business as usual.
But, the glitch in the laws is this: Some DNA remains in the donor egg from the second individual. And that could make a slight genetic difference in the clone, and lawyers could argue that the clone is not an exact duplicate of the first individual.
California, she said, has adopted a law that prohibits the transfer of a nucleus into a human donor egg. But, she says, technology may be running circles around the law here. Scientists recently said that cow eggs could serve as a universal incubator for nucleic DNA of other mammalian species, she said.
She says laws prohibiting the transfer of the nucleus into a human egg clear a path around the law for doctors using donor cow eggs. She adds that bans against creating a genetically identical human being might not apply to the creation of a headless organ donor, which some might argue, does not count as an individual.
Dr. Arthur Caplan, a bioethics specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, said at the same meeting that he is not optimistic that the country will do a good job regulating cloning. He says much of the debate is fueled by ignorance and a fear that the technology is running amok. As a result, the debate is tackling the wrong questions. He says the focus of the cloning debates should be on whether it would be good for a specific cloned individual, rather than the current focus which is on whether it would be good for society.
