ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 6, 1997 TAG: 9704040099
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY THE ROANOKE TIMES
The process used successfully to copy a sheep in Scotland is seen by some as a breaktrough for infertile human couples but is morally unacceptable by others.
From the pulpit of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg to cable television's Sci-Fi Channel, the talk has been about an 8-month-old lamb named Dolly.
Dolly was cloned, created without the aid of a male sheep, a ram. The original purpose of the experiment that produced her was to find better ways to make genetic modifications in animals.
However, her existence raises the issue - and all of the ethical concerns - of whether humans may someday be produced in the same way.
Altering the genetic makeup of animals is nothing new. By manipulating DNA in animal ova, researchers have made cows that produce more milk and pigs that become leaner pork at the supermarket. Altered goats produce milk that includes a protein used in making an anti-clotting drug for treatment of heart attacks and strokes in humans.
In these cases, though, reproduction still was carried out with an egg and sperm.
Dolly, who the February issue of Nature magazine revealed had been born seven months previously at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, doesn't have a daddy.
In a very simplified explanation of how this little lamb came to be: DNA taken from the egg of a 6-year-old ewe was merged, using electrical current, into an unfertilized egg from another ewe. The activated egg was then implanted in a third ewe.
The process has been hailed as another option for infertile human couples and condemned as a threat to the traditional Christian understanding of creation.
Has Dolly brought humankind into an era when women no longer need men for reproduction?
Or, is she another step toward solving many of humans' ailments more quickly?
|--| The cloning of humans is frightening, said Harold Willmington, dean of Liberty Bible Institute at Liberty University. He preached on the topic Easter Sunday at Thomas Road Baptist Church, an evangelical church that has thousands of members and an electronic ministry.
Willmington said in an interview last week that he has no objection to the cloning of animals to benefit humans through the development of drugs or even to use animal organs as transplants in humans. But changing basic reproduction for humans is unacceptable, he said.
He said his position on cloning remains as he wrote in his 1983 book, "Signs of the Times," where he said cloning would have more appeal to lesbian couples than to infertile heterosexual couples.
Willmington said he finds Biblical support for the different positions on animal and human cloning from language in Genesis.
After God made animals, God commanded them to reproduce after "their kind," Willmington said. When God created man, the word "our" was used.
"There is an incredible difference between "after its kind" and "after our likeness," Willmington said. "Man is in a class by himself."
University of Virginia biomedical ethics professor Dr. John Fletcher takes the position that human cloning would be ethically acceptable under certain conditions.
Cloning one member of a couple when the other is at very high genetic risk for a severe and untreatable disease such as Huntington's, which causes insanity and death, would be an acceptable option for that couple, Fletcher said.
The couple's other moral options, he said, are conventional prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion of a fetus that carries the gene for the disease or preimplantation genetic diagnosis and selection of embryos that are free of the disease.
Selective abortion is permitted, but carries with it "moral anguish" and "psychological burdens" for couples who plan and want the pregnancy, he said.
"They face a tragic choice ... aborting a wanted and planned pregnancy," he said in an interview and also wrote for an Internet forum on the issue of cloning.
"Genetic abortions are very different from elective abortions because the couple decides against a particular genotype, rather than against a whole pregnancy itself," Fletcher said.
Cloning is not without consequences, Fletcher said, and posed the following considerations:
Is it psychologically and socially more difficult to rear a child when the child is the offspring of one partner and perhaps a donor egg?
Does adding the cloning option take us more in the direction of positive than negative eugenics, which is the control of hereditary factors in mating?
What are some of the possible negative social consequences?
Despite potential consequences, Fletcher said he foresees that cloning "may have a place" in human asexual reproduction in the future.
President Clinton's at least temporary ban on federal money being used for human cloning projects doesn't prohibit private industry from trying it, although Clinton asked private researchers to refrain from such research.
A scientist with a $100,000 lab could do cloning, said one researcher interviewed for a "Cloning: Mistake or Miracle?" program on the Sci-Fi last week.
Images of cloned slaves and armies or clones created as organ donors rise at the extreme of the cloning controversy.
These are secretive, back alley images that won't happen if the entire issue is kept public, suggested a Pennsylvania professor.
"One factor that will make a difference in the direction of human cloning, if we're wise, will be if it's done in a way that we can keep the research open and accountable," Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said on the Sci-Fi show.
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