Ride For Life: Allow cloning research

By recommending a four-year moratorium on all cloning, the President's Council on Bioethics wimps out on an opportunity to guide coherent policy on what is perhaps the most profound ethical dilemma of our time.

A moratorium is not much better than a ban, which the Bush administration advocates. A moratorium would merely put off a decision on a contentious matter that's not likely to get less so, in four years or 40. Meanwhile, patients suffering from diseases that could one day be cured by research using stem cells derived through cloning are losing precious time. Thankfully, opponents of cloning don't have the votes in the U.S. Senate to effect a total ban. They should accede to a ban on reproductive human cloning and allow research cloning, known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, to go forward with governmental supervision. This technology has great promise in treating devastating diseases and prolonging lives. Even if most of it never pans out, how shameful to say we never gave it a try.

Virtually all parties in this debate agree it would be wrong to duplicate an individual through cell manipulation, creating an exact copy of the cell donor.

Experimentation of this sort is both unethical and potentially unsafe, not to mention creepy.

Cloning cells for medical research, however, should be encouraged and regulated to ensure against abuses. The process involves stimulating embryonic growth by transferring cell material -- such as a skin cell -- into a human egg in order to produce potentially healing stem cells.

This alternative was suggested by seven dissenting members of the president's 18-member bioethics council, demonstrating the deep divide. If these experts cannot agree after seven months of study, why would they be any closer in four years?

Those who oppose cloning on general principle view it as immoral. The majority of Mr. Bush's advisers want a moratorium to buy time to make their case "in a more democratic way." That sounds like a euphemism for "until the issue goes away." What could be more democratic than a compromise that bans human reproductive cloning and lets research continue?

The cloning genie is out of the bottle at this point, and scientists from other nations will make discoveries while U.S. scientists either move elsewhere or sit with their hands tied. Meanwhile, patients awaiting medical breakthroughs will be denied the best medicine available -- hope.