BY FAR THE MOST outspoken critic of cloning is Leon Kass, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who chairs the President’s Council on Bioethics. Kass, who comes across in a recent Times profile as a moderate conservative, is the author of two long, fierce anti-cloning essays for the New Republic — the first published in 1997, shortly after the announcement of Dolly’s birth, and the second (largely a rehash of the first) about a year ago.
Kass directs most of his fire at reproductive cloning, but argues that therapeutic cloning can’t be countenanced because the two are inextricably linked. In his 1997 essay he wrote that "the existence of cloned human embryos in the laboratory, created to begin with only for research purposes, would surely pave the way for later baby-making implantations." And, in truth, Kass isn’t too wild about cloning strictly limited to therapeutic use, either, as he rails against "the utilitarian creation of embryonic genetic duplicates of oneself, to be frozen away or created when necessary, in case of need for homologous tissues or organs for transplantation."
Kass’s opposition is of particular importance because he has George W. Bush’s ear. But he is hardly alone. Also in the New Republic, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer recently came out against therapeutic cloning despite having endorsed stem-cell research last year. Among other things, Krauthammer — a physician, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and, significantly, a wheelchair-user — argues that therapeutic cloning makes it necessary to engage in the dehumanizing practice of creating and then destroying embryos, which, clumps of cells though they may be, are also potential human beings. Wrote Krauthammer: "You can try to regulate embryonic research to prohibit the creation of Brave New World monsters; you can build fences on the slippery slope, regulating how many days you may grow an embryo for research; but once you countenance the very creation of human embryos for no other purpose than for their parts, you have crossed a moral frontier."
Another conservative, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, warns that if therapeutic cloning is not banned, then "even darker nightmares" will surely follow. Writing for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the historian Francis Fukuyama (whose new book, Our Posthuman Future, is a jeremiad against much of biotechnology) argues that isolationism and cloning represent two excesses of 1990s-style libertarianism that society must reject. In a similar vein, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru wrote that "human cloning is quickly rising to the top of issues that divide libertarians from conservatives." (Ponnuru, a pro-life conservative, goes so far as to argue that "therapeutic cloning is less defensible than reproductive cloning, because the former involves the killing of a human being and the latter does not.")
If Kass, Krauthammer, and Fukuyama represent a center/center-right point of view, and Kristol and Ponnuru hold down the right flank, what of the left? Normally, the left could be counted on to support cloning — or at least therapeutic cloning — as a natural outgrowth of its support for reproductive freedom. After all, one can hardly have qualms about creating and destroying days-old clumps of cells when one has no moral objections to first- and second-trimester abortions.
But though mainstream liberals do, indeed, support therapeutic cloning, the non-mainstream left — the farther left, as it were — has formed an alliance with conservatives to oppose all forms of cloning. Earlier this year, 67 progressives signed a letter supporting a total ban on cloning — a counterweight (if a not particularly heavy one) to the 40 Nobel Prize winners who petitioned President Bush, unsuccessfully, to allow therapeutic cloning to continue.
Leftist gadfly Jeremy Rifkin, a long-time critic of all things biotech, wrote in the Nation recently that therapeutic cloning is anti-woman (because it provides financial incentives for potential egg donors to undergo intrusive hormone treatments and surgery) and anti-freedom (because it could lead to reproductive cloning and the rise of "a commercial eugenics civilization ... in which global life science companies become the ultimate arbiters of the evolutionary process itself").
Another leftist, the environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben, argued on the New York Times’ op-ed page, "Cloning of any kind is a step toward genetic engineering — toward improving human beings. In other words, toward leaving the natural world behind."
ON MAY 8, Severino Antinori, an Italian fertility doctor, announced that three of his patients were pregnant with clones. He offered no details, and scientific experts were highly skeptical of his claims. If he is telling the truth, his actions would be monstrously unethical. Philosophical objections aside, animal experiments show that cloning technology is a long way from being perfected, and Antinori’s project would likely result in the birth of babies with heartbreaking deformities.
Antinori is, nevertheless, living proof that we can’t afford the sort of high-minded detachment advocated by the likes of Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama, and Jeremy Rifkin. If someone opposes therapeutic cloning on religious or moral grounds — that is, if the objection is based on the belief that a 200-cell blastocyst is a human life that must not be destroyed — well, such a position can at least be defended, in the same way that the absolutist anti-choice position can be defended.
But if, instead, the objection to therapeutic cloning rests on the notion that there’s a slippery slope, and we’re in danger of sliding down it, then that position is, ultimately, indefensible. If therapeutic cloning is morally acceptable but reproductive cloning isn’t, then it’s wrong — immoral, even — to object to the first because it might possibly lead to the second.
The scientist Gregory Stock, the author of Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future, put it this way in a March debate with Fukuyama on the libertarian Web site Reason.com: "Any serious attempt to blockade such research [that is, therapeutic cloning] will simply increase the upcoming technologies’ potential dangers by driving the work out of sight and depriving us of early indications of any medical or social problems."
In other words, the federal government may have the power to put Advanced Cell Technology out of business — or at least force it to move from Worcester to Britain or another more hospitable country. But the government cannot do anything about the clones that may or may not be growing in the wombs of Severino Antinori’s patients.
In a piece for the May 5 Washington Post, Ted Halstead and Michael Lind, of the centrist New America Foundation, noted that under the Brownback-Landrieu bill to ban all cloning, an American who seeks clone-based treatment overseas could be subject to arrest and imprisonment upon returning to the United States.
"The repercussions of criminalizing therapeutic cloning would be nightmarish," they wrote. "It would be as if America’s War on Drugs were duplicated by a far more intrusive War on Medicine — a war in which the federal government hunted down and arrested ordinary Americans with treatable and curable illnesses."
The moral objections to therapeutic cloning are not frivolous. But as Gregory Stock, Ted Halstead, and Michael Lind suggest, those objections fall apart when they come up against the realities of the world in which we actually live. There are dangers in allowing therapeutic cloning to move ahead, but the alternative would be worse.
It’s easy to avoid the slippery slope. It’s much harder — but necessary — to stake out a spot on that slope and push uphill for principles and values that are worth fighting for. Therapeutic cloning holds incredible promise for curing some of the most intractable medical conditions. Rather than wringing our hands over the possibility that it might lead to a horrifying Brave New World, we should draw lines and then defend those lines. Medical research, yes. Genetically engineered humans, no.
Opponents would argue that they stand for not letting science control us. In the process, though, they are letting their fear of science control them.
Far better for us to control science — or at least to give it our best shot.
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dan@dankennedy.net
