Human Cloning

Recently, several scientific groups worldwide have claimed the ability to clone human embryos, including teams in South Korea, Great Britain and the United States. Although every group has assured the public and scientific community that the goal of their efforts is not to produce human clones and that they have no intentions of allowing the embryos to mature into fully developed babies, the research has opened new doors for medical treatment and science.

All groups thus far have cloned the embryos to retrieve the stem cells - the primordial cells found in embryos that have the potential to develop and differentiate into separate types of the 210 different kinds of cells in the adult human. Stem cells have the ability to mature into heart cells, liver cells, or lung tissue, etc. Once the stem cells are isolated, specific types of tissue would be cultivated for use in research, transplants and for possible treatments for patients with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and diabetes among others.

Embryonic stem cell By permission John D. Gearhart

So far, none of the research teams have allowed the embryos to develop beyond the fourteenth day, the day when nerve cells differentiate. Nevertheless, the research has initiated an uproar. R. Alta Charo, professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin said, "Oh my! This is certainly going to make the debate surrounding embryo research ever more urgent." The anti-abortion group LIFE of Great Britain fears that embryonic stem cell research is the first step to producing fully cloned human babies, despite the fact that the cloning of human infants has been expressly banned by a 1990 British Parliament law.

President Clinton in the United States has asked the Bioethics Advisory Committee, headed by Harold Shapiro of Princeton University, for a full report detailing the stem cell research process and the history of the project. Although he was "deeply troubled" to learn that a portion of the research involved combining bovine (cow) egg cells with human DNA, he was optimistic at the prospect of medical advances to help patients with debilitating disease and those in need of organ transplants. The president has met with several ethicists, scientists, and political advisors, and has continued to uphold the 1994 prohibition on federal funding for human cloning research, despite protests from several research groups.

As scientific progress marches on and as new discoveries are made, the scientific community and the public must face new dilemmas and possibilities.