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Experts differ on cloning regulation

By JENNIFER LORD, For United Press International

WASHINGTON, May 14 (UPI) -- It is a good thing that in the future, parents will be able to predetermine the physical traits of their children -- providing that current anti-cloning legislation before Congress does not pass -- Reason magazine science correspondent Ronald Bailey said recently at the New America Foundation.

Speaking at a packed brown-bag luncheon on May 9, Bailey discussed current genetic testing technology that allows parents to prevent passing on genetic diseases to their children and said that in the future, reproductive cloning will go even farther by allowing parents to bear children with pre-chosen chromosomes, which will allow them to determine their offspring's looks, intelligence and other traits. All these applications of human genetic science are to the good, he said.

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"Respecting the sanctity of human life does not require that we accept all the horrors that nature chooses to dish out," said Bailey, who has written many articles in favor of genetic engineering and is a strong supporter of Congress granting complete freedom to research scientists to explore new possibilities in the field. His most recent article appears in Reason magazine, which is published by the libertarian Reason Foundation.

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Many of his colleagues in the think tank world disagree with him, however. For a variety of reasons, other analysts at both conservative and liberal-leaning think tanks call for either total or partial regulation of human cloning and of other human genetic research that may lead to experimental medical treatments.

Eric Cohen, a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said that bioengineering experiments can't be done in a way that is consistent with the ethics of human experimentation, so they should be banned.

"Human beings are not animals -- there's something fundamentally different about human beings, and we ought not to be treated as animals who are bred to specifications," said Cohen.

He said that the "tragic results" of animal cloning -- cloned animals appear to develop health problems (Dolly the sheep, the first surviving clone, has severe arthritis), and cloned animals frequently die at birth or soon afterward, and seem to have very short life spans generally -- should be a strong indicator that the science is not ready to be tried on humans.

At the meeting, Bailey spoke out against the bipartisan Brownback-Landrieu Human Cloning Prohibition Act, a bill that banned all human cloning. He said repro-genetic technologies do not violate the rights of the unborn and those opponents of cloning attempt to frighten lawmakers with unverified predictions of future genetic mutations.

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Bailey also said that the future should not be viewed with fear, but instead with great expectation, because reproductive cloning would prevent many negative attributes of natural human genetics, such as inherited diseases, from surfacing.

Daniel Callahan, director of International Programs at the New York-based Hastings Center disagrees. Picking out your child's personality traits is a bad and hazardous business, Callahan said.

"We have no idea how it is going to turn out, and it's very hard to imagine that in most cases it will be beneficial for the child," Callahan said. "Show me that those (genetically engineered) children will actually be better off than they would if we had left them untouched."

Callahan maintains that the government should step in now and begin regulating the industry.

"Someone like Ronald Bailey seems to think that anything science wants to do is almost de facto a good thing, and are opposed to any form of interference, but I think that is a naive view of science. Science can do good things and it can do bad things, and one of our human tasks is to make some distinctions and say that there are certain things that science ought not to do," Callahan said.

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Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a leftward-leaning think tank, agreed that Congress should pass measures to regulate the industry but not to ban it completely.

"Right now we are just at the point where we are going to need to develop some sort of regulatory regime for it. I think that's what the public really wants, and I think that's what the reality of the technology demands," Teixeira said.

Steve Buckstein, president of the Cascade Policy Institute, an Oregon-based, free-market think tank, is completely against any regulation of the cloning industry.

"I don't think that 100 senators and 400-some Congress people should be making the rules about this," said Buckstein. "I think that science has helped more than it's hurt the human race, and genetic engineering and cloning and all of these new technologies have far more potential for good than for harm. Obviously there are risks involved, and it's good to look at those, but to stop progress because of this would be unfortunate."

Other free-marketers also supported further developments in human biotechnology, but thought the issue should be decided by future generations.

Patrick Stephens, a research fellow at the Objectivist Center, a philosophical think tank that endorses author Ayn Rand's principals of individualism, said bioengineering humans would not happen in the near future.

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"The science is not there yet and probably won't be for decades and decades at least. I think that on the whole, genetic engineering will be a very positive thing for mankind," Stephens said. "The ability to select out diseases like Alzheimer's, autism, Parkinson's and various other genetic defects has the potential to be an enormous medical device. Most of modern medicine is curative, whereas this would be preventative."

Bailey was similarly optimistic about the future. He said government regulation was the main obstacle to future innovation.

Lack of government regulation in the past, Bailey said, was the main reason why the field of genetic science is so successful today.

"If we had regulation of fertility treatments by the Food and Drug Administration, we would still be waiting for the first test-tube baby," Bailey said. "Fortunately, our descendants will have at their disposal even more technologies. And the benefit of our own bad experiences now to guide them in their future reproductive decisions. They will in no way be prisoners of our decisions now."

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