WASHINGTON
- In a speech evoking images of embryo farms, custom-made children and
desperate women pressured into selling their eggs, President Bush urged the
Senate on Wednesday to outlaw all forms of human cloning.
Saying human cloning had moved from science fiction into
science, Bush pressed for a ban not only on cloning aimed at producing a baby,
but on techniques aimed at helping patients grow their own tissue transplants.
His opinion clashes with that of many in the scientific
community, which has broadly backed research using cloning techniques, but Bush
said he had moral authority on his side.
"As we seek to improve human life, we must always
preserve human dignity," Bush said in a White House address. "And therefore we must
prevent human cloning by stopping it before it starts."
To allow cloning would be to move toward a society
"in which human beings are grown for spare body parts and children are
engineered to custom specifications -- and that's not acceptable."
Bush praised a bill sponsored by Kansas Republican Sen.
Sam Brownback and Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu that would ban all forms of cloning, including
somatic cell nuclear transfer, the method used so far to make cloned sheep,
mice, pigs and a cat.
It involves clearing the nucleus from an egg and
inserting the nucleus from an adult cell. This programs the egg to start
dividing as if it had been fertilized by a sperm. If implanted into a womb, the
embryo can grow into a baby.
Also called therapeutic cloning, many scientists want to
experiment with this method to see if it offers a way to help patients grow
their own tissue transplants. They say the initial ball of cells is only
technically an embryo and is in no way destined to become a human baby.
RIVAL BILL GETS BIPARTISAN SUPPORT
Senators who support therapeutic cloning said on
Wednesday they were teaming up with a bill to rival Brownback's
that would outlaw reproductive cloning -- meant to create a living baby -- but
allow therapeutic cloning.
Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Arlen Specter and Democratic
Sens. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Dianne Feinstein of California and Tom Harkin
of Iowa said they would combine two existing bills into one and try to drum up
support for it.
"It would be unconscionable for Congress to prohibit
medical research that offers hope to so many people with crippling and often
incurable diseases," Feinstein said.
The House of Representatives has already passed a
comprehensive ban on all forms of cloning. To become law, a bill must be passed
by both the House and Senate and then signed by the president.
Bush says he will veto any bill that allows any kind of
human cloning.
"Do we impede progress in some of the most
debilitating diseases known to man or do we allow research to go forward as
long as we ban human cloning?" Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle asked.
"The president wants to ban it all and I think he's wrong
and I think the American people are on our side."
Brownback says he has 29
co-sponsors. "This issue must be addressed by the Senate before the
technology overtakes the debate," he told a news conference.
Earlier on Wednesday 40 Nobel laureate scientists,
including some of the country's leading genetic and cancer researchers,
released a letter urging senators to support legislation that would allow
therapeutic cloning.
"Senator Brownback's
legislation ... would have a chilling effect on all scientific research in the
United States," they wrote.
April 10, 2002
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