Clinton calls for ban on human cloning.

A federal bioethics panel wants Congress to ban attempts to create a human being by cloning, but the group stops short of prohibiting research on cloned human embryos. President Clinton sent legislation embodying these recommendations to Congress this week.

The President asked the National Bioethics Advisory Commission--18 medical, legal, and ethics experts--to review the prospect of human cloning after Scottish researchers created a lamb from a cell of an adult sheep (SN: 3/1/97, p. 132). The panel now concludes that it would be "morally unacceptable for anyone in the public or private sector ... to attempt to create a child" by implanting cloned embryos in a woman.

Although no federal money can be used to support research on human cloning, no specific U.S. law forbids it. "A motivated person and technician could collaborate at an infertility clinic to do this," says Alta Charo, a panel member from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Moreover, the cloning technique used by the Scots would pose great risks to humans, the panel says. Before successfully cloning a lamb, the researchers failed 277 times, producing many abnormal and stillborn animals, Charo says.

The cloning debate pits some fertility clinics, which want cloning explored to open possible options for infertile couples, against abortion foes, who believe that life starts at conception and want to stop all cloning work with human embryos.

Most biotechnology research that might use cloning focuses on animals and thus falls outside this debate. For example, much genetic work uses animals as models of human disease--a process that often involves placing human genes in the animals. Other scientists aim to develop animals whose organs could be transplanted into humans. The Scottish researchers are trying to create animals that secrete beneficial drugs in their milk. Once scientists have created a particular useful animal, cloning would enable them to recreate it many times over.

The leap from duplicating animals to cloning people raises moral questions that lie at the heart of the panel's recommendation. A child born of cloning would face "an enormous weight of social and parental expectations about what and who that child should be," says panel member Ezekiel Emanuel of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Nonetheless, childless couples may someday want the option of cloning themselves, and those who have one child but then become sterile might hope to clone that child, in effect creating a later-born identical twin, says molecular biologist Lee Silver of Princeton University. He applauds Clinton's proposal that the law be revisited after 4 1/2 years to review the state of the science.

"In the long run, human cloning is a sideshow," says Arthur Caplan of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "It's an oddball little subset of genetic engineering."

A more immediate concern, Caplan says, is that the debate over cloning may spur a backlash against genetic research in general.