President Clinton was right in issuing a five-year moratorium on human cloning research, said academicians from UCSF and UC Berkeley, who spoke Monday at at forum sponsored by the UC Systemwide Biotechnology Research and Education Program.

If and whether public and private researchers should develop the technology enabling the cloning of an adult sheep, however, is a question that needs to be fleshed out by society as a whole. Even so, a consensus may never be reached, several representatives agreed. The moratorium allows scientists to conduct research on duplicates of human embryos, but it prohibits them from implanting those embryos into a woman’s womb to clone people.

The scientific technique, patented by Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Scotland, involved removing the nucleus of an unfertilized egg and substituting the nucleus of a cell taken from the udder of an adult sheep. Once the egg was fertilized, it was implanted into a surrogate ewe, which later gave birth to Dolly, the world’s first mammal ever to be cloned from the DNA of an adult cell.

But according to Troy Duster, a professor at Berkeley’s Institute for Study of Social Change who recently met with Wilmut, Wilmut told him that “he was beginning to see evidence, partial and inconclusive evidence, that Dolly’s cells were aging in a way that were unlikely for a mammal at that age. “It troubled him,” Duster said.

Charles Epstein, director of the UCSF division of medical genetics, said the first scientific citation on cloning “was written in Genesis II, verses 21 to 23, in which the Lord used the rib of a man to make a woman.

Charles Epstein

“The technology which the Creator used is essentially the technology which we’re now talking about. He took somatic cells, which were the rib, He reprogrammed them in some way and created a woman from that,” Epstein continued. “Can we clone humans? It might be hard to get it just right, but there’s nothing conceptual that’s missing and my feeling is yeah, we will eventually be able to do it. The decision is basically ‘do we?’”

George Scangos of Exelixis Pharmaceuticals Inc., said, “The question of ‘now that we can, should we?’ is not the right question in my mind because I don’t believe that we can.” But, he said, the technology could be used, in theory, to help scientists understand how to regenerate new organs or how to regenerate cells in the pancreas that make insulin.

“I think the technology has both very pragmatic and very long-term implications for understanding how to treat diseases,” Scangos said. “I don’t think cloning humans is a profit center for the biotech industry. But cloning animals could be very useful.”

A member of the audience questioned the panel about the ethics of cloning one child to save another with a life-threatening illness. Karen Lebacqz, a professor in Berkeley’s department of ethics, said it’s an interesting question for medical ethicists, but “that’s an issue no matter what technique parents use.

“It’s a violation of the Kantian principle of value of people as means to themselves.” Whatever the role of the ethicists, Duster believes the debate will remain split between those who support human cloning from a civil libertarian viewpoint and those who oppose it for moral or ethical reasons.

And, he said, decisions about using the technology are not an ‘either/or’ situation. Although a moratorium exists on human cloning, none exists on cloning research among rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees, with whom humans share an enormous amount of genetic information.

“The technology that’s being deployed, somatic cell transfer, can be used for other things besides cloning,” he said. “That’s setting the table.”

“If we’re cloning with these kinds of technology in very high mammals, we could be setting the stage for human cloning at the end of the moratorium,” said Duster.

By Brad Foss

1st appeared 7/23/97