Reeve Joins Kennedy in Support for Bill Allowing Therapeutic Cloning
By Kelly Field
WASHINGTON, March 05–Quadriplegic actor Christopher Reeve joined Senator Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass, yesterday to endorse a bill that would allow human embryonic cloning for medical research.
The “Cloning Prohibition Act,” introduced by Kennedy and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Cal, would ban reproductive cloning, but permit “therapeutic cloning,” the transfer of cell nuclei into egg cells whose nuclei have been removed. Scientists believe that these “reprogrammed” cells could eventually be used to provide treatment for the millions of Americans who now suffer from cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, ALS and spinal cord injury.
“Some people are able to accept living with a severe disability,” said Reeve, who has been unable to eat, wash, go to the bathroom or get dressed by himself since being thrown from his horse and paralyzed in 1995. “I am not one of them.”
Therapeutic cloning, Reeve said, could give “hundreds of millions of people around the world who are afflicted withá.diseases and disabilities exactly the kind of chance that we need.”
Proponents of therapeutic cloning, or “somatic cell nuclear transfer,” (SCNT) as it is called in scientific circles, argue that it is necessary to create replacement cells and tissues are that are compatible with patients own immune systems. They maintain that therapeutic cloning could be used to create new stem cells that would be perfectly matched to the DNA code of the target patient.
“We must not confuse human cloning with regenerative medicine,” said Kennedy, at a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee which he chairs. “One creates a person, and should be banned. The other provides a cure, and deserves our strong support.”
Reproductive cloning involves the development of a full individual from a body cell. It is the technology used by Scottish scientists in 1997 to create Dolly the sheep and more recently by Texas scientists to create CC the cat. Kennedy’s bill would outlaw this type of cloning, making it a federal crime to implant a cloned embryo into a woman’s uterus.
But opponents of the Kennedy bill insist that there are safer methods of medical research that don’t require the destruction of human embryos. They suggest that comparable medical advances could be accomplished through the human genome project and research on adult and embryonic stem cells, and raise the specter of a new era of eugenics and made-to-order, designer babies.
“The idea that you would use science to produce a human being to specifications flies in the face of some fundamental beliefs. The fact is cloning humans is wrong,” said Senator Judd Gregg, R-N.H., at the hearing.
Gregg is a co-sponsor of an alternative piece of legislation that would ban all human cloning and create strict penalties for those who violate the ban. That legislation, introduced by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, and Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-LA., resembles a bill passed by the House of Representatives last year and is expected to be considered by the Senate in the next couple of weeks.
“Creating human life simply for the purpose of destroying it is immoral, unethical, and should be illegal,” said Landrieu at the hearing.
Landrieu said that cloning research would put women-particularly poor women-at risk by subjecting them to undue pressure to donate eggs. Some studies suggest that the ovarian stimulating drugs that women take to produce larger number of eggs can pose a risk to future fertility.
“The exploitation of women in this process is inevitable,” said Landrieu. “In this brave new world, women’s eggs and wombs would be commodities sold to the highest bidder.”
Judy Norsigian, Executive Director and Founder of the Boston Women’s Health Collective, agreed that “the reality is that women with limited financial resources will be the primary providers of human eggs” if therapeutic cloning is allowed.
Published in The Eagle-Tribune, in Lawrence, Mass.
