Clone Wars, Part II: Other fronts, other battles.

If the science of cloning is advancing rapidly, the politics of it are changing almost as fast. We've come a long way from the debates of the summer of 2001. Then the question was whether the federal government should fund research on stem cells taken from human embryos. The embryos would be destroyed in the process, but funding supporters reasoned that it was acceptable to destroy fertility clinics' surplus embryos. Many of these supporters said, however, that they opposed the creation of embryos for research purposes.

"Private companies are creating embryos specifically for stem cells, and I think that's a very bad idea . . . which gets on the path of cloning," Sen. Arlen Specter told Fox News in June 2001. Sens. Tom Daschle, Chris Dodd, Tom Harkin, and Orrin Hatch all said similar things. In July 2001, the House of Representatives voted 265-162 to ban human cloning for any purpose.

The bipartisan consensus against cloning proved short-lived. The Senate has not followed the House's lead on cloning. Indeed, all of the senators mentioned above now favor precisely what they once forswore: the creation, through cloning, of human embryos for research purposes. And they are all opposed to Sen. Sam Brownback's bill banning cloning entirely. Specter and Hatch are leading sponsors of a bill that would allow the cloning of embryos for research but forbid their implantation in a woman's womb. Scientists would be allowed to clone human embryos, so long as they destroy them in the process of research rather than let them develop into fetuses. Thus the National Right to Life Committee calls it a "clone-and-kill bill."

What will be the subject of next year's debate? Sen. Byron Dorgan's bill may offer a foretaste. It allows cloning and even implantation in the womb so long as these things are not done "for the purpose of creating a cloned human being." The bill does not define the term "human being," but it appears to open the door to developing cloned human fetuses for research.

Pro-life opponents of cloning regard the changed political environment as evidence that we're sliding down a slippery slope. But it could also be seen as a natural result of politicians' having to think on their feet about a new and challenging subject. The Supreme Court, which relieved them of the responsibility of arguing about embryonic human life in the abortion debate a generation ago, has not settled the status of cloning.

Hence the debate over cloning is robust. But it is stuck in questions of terminology. At first, the proponents of cloning for research created the phrase "therapeutic cloning," as distinguished from the "reproductive cloning" most of them oppose. In both cases, the procedure for cloning was the same: The cloner would remove the nucleus from an egg cell and replace it with the nucleus of a cell from the person he is cloning.

The term "therapeutic cloning" has fallen out of favor. For one thing, cloning research may not result in immediate benefits for patients (e.g., transplants developed from their clones). In January, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences argued that "the greatest benefit" of cloning would be the ability to study the progress of genetic diseases in cloned embryos.

The major drawback of "therapeutic cloning," however, is that it includes the unpopular C-word. The new tactic is to replace that phrase with such technically accurate, though incomprehensible, terms as "somatic cell nuclear transfer" and "nuclear transplantation." Specter's bill redefines cloning as the act of implanting an embryo created by nuclear transplantation. He can therefore say that his bill bans cloning. Even Sen. Dorgan's bill is called the "Human Cloning Prohibition Act."

This semantic sleight of hand has caused a fair amount of confusion. So has simple ignorance. In a February interview with Tim Russert, Sen. Dianne Feinstein kept saying that her own bill would "clearly make it illegal to inject one of these stem cells into a woman's uterus" to create a pregnancy. Nobody besides Feinstein has ever maintained that injecting a stem cell into a uterus would result in pregnancy. An embryo could be destroyed to get its stem cells, or it could be implanted to start a pregnancy.

Other lowlights of the debate include Sen. Hatch's remark that "it would be terrible to say because of an ethical concept that we can't do anything for" patients, and Sen. Specter's response, upon being asked when he believed life began: "I have not found it helpful to get into the details."

The Senate has reached a stalemate, with around 43 votes estimated for Specter's bill and 43 for Sam Brownback's ban on all human cloning. Hatch's decision to join Specter in late April was a minor coup for the pro-cloners, since Hatch is a pro-lifer and had pledged to oppose cloning during a primary challenge in 2000. In early June, liberal senator Mark Dayton stopped co-sponsoring Dorgan's bill after learning about its radicalism. Otherwise, the senators remain frozen in place.

To round up more senators, Specter is presenting his bill as a compromise. Since everyone agrees on banning reproductive cloning, why not enact that ban and argue about research cloning later? The pro- cloners have made some concessions. Their leading bill no longer explicitly prohibits states from banning all cloning, for example.

But pro-lifers reject in principle any compromise that entails a federal mandate to destroy cloned human embryos. They also believe, with the Justice Department, that such a ban would be unenforceable. It would be impossible to tell whether an embryo was being created for reproductive purposes or research purposes, and impossible to tell whether an embryo being implanted was a clone.

President Bush's bioethics commission is, at this writing, as stalemated as the Senate. This is surprising: It was widely assumed that the commission would be stacked against cloning, given that both Bush and scholar Leon Kass, the chairman of the commission, oppose it. But Kass preferred to hold a seminar of smart, knowledgeable people without a majority committed to any position. As a result, the commission could end up undercutting Bush's position.

The pro-cloning forces have a lot going for them. The biotech industry has plenty of money. It's said that cloning might lead to treatments or cures of illnesses from which many Americans suffer -- including celebrities and relatives of politicians who can be enlisted as lobbyists. The pro-abortion movement is a powerful group that is bound to oppose any suggestion that the destruction of human embryos can ever be prohibited.

On the other side are pro-lifers and a smattering of environmentalists concerned about "the commodification of human life" (biotech firms have acquired patents on cloned embryos). The public, while not being particularly knowledgeable about the issue, seems to oppose cloning human beings. A May Gallup poll found that 61 percent of the public opposed cloning human embryos for biomedical research while only 34 percent supported it.

Cloning has become an issue in a few Senate races. In Missouri, Republican Jim Talent is criticizing incumbent Democrat Jean Carnahan's support for cloning in his stump speeches. Tim Johnson, a South Dakota Democrat, is on the defensive about his co-sponsorship of Dorgan's bill. The state legislature voted almost unanimously to ban all cloning, and the National Right to Life Committee has run ads against Johnson. In June, the state Democratic party started running ads in response.

Maybe voters will break the stalemate.