May 4, 2001

Senate Panel Reviews Human Cloning Issues

Congress should pass legislation banning the cloning of humans to prevent "turning human reproduction into a manufacturing process." That was a theme repeated again and again by witnesses at a May 2 hearing before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space. The hearing was chaired by Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), who has sponsored a bill (S. 790) to prohibit the cloning of humans.

The slate of witnesses was heavily slanted in support of Sen. Brownback's legislation and included Rep. Dave Weldon (R-Fla.), sponsor of companion legislation to the Brownback bill in the House (H.R. 1644), and representatives of various religious and activist groups who presented moral, ethical, and legal arguments against human cloning. These witnesses repeated the themes that human cloning represents unethical experimentation and that reproductive cloning cannot be separated from therapeutic cloning and therefore all human cloning should be banned. Panelists also rejected using human embryos as a source of stem cells for research, pointing to recent work using adult stem cells as "fruitful and morally unproblematic alternatives" to embryonic stem cells.

Rudolf Jaenisch, Ph.D., professor of biology at MIT's Whitehead Institute, who spoke on behalf of the American Society for Cell Biology; and Carl Feldbaum, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, also opposed cloning to produce humans but attempted to distinguish between reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning, noting the potential of embryonic stem cells to treat a variety of disease, and citing the uncertainty that adult stem cells will provide the same potential.

Information: Dave Moore, AAMC Office of Governmental Relations, 202-828-0525.