DATE: Wednesday, May 7, 1997                TAG: 9705070431

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A4   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Focus 

SOURCE: LOS ANGELES TIMES 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   52 lines

IF IT WILL NOT HELP SOCIETY, DON'T DO IT, SCIENTIST SAYS

Dr. Gary Hodgen stands at the place where science and politics collide. As America's lawmakers grapple with the cloning of a sheep named Dolly, he would like to contribute a little history to the debate.

Hodgen is a fertility pioneer. In 1980, while at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., he proposed an experiment that, he believed, held the promise of someday eradicating Tay-Sachs disease, a genetic affliction that kills children by the time they become toddlers.

The goal was to help Tay-Sachs carriers have healthy babies. But Hodgen's plan ran smack into a ban on government funding for human embryo research, and his bosses vetoed it. So he packed his bags and headed south, to a renowned private fertility clinic with its own research labs - the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine.

In 1994 Hodgen engineered the birth of a healthy girl to a Louisiana couple whose first child had died of Tay-Sachs at age 3.

Hodgen's experience illustrates the paradox of America's approach to the brave new world of reproductive biology: While the United States has some of the tightest restrictions of any industrial nation on what can be done with government funds, it has no limits on what private money can buy - and little appetite to interfere with the private practice of medicine.

``You cannot have government simply say you can't go and learn that, don't be curious about that,'' said the 53-year-old scientist, now president of the Jones Institute. ``It has always failed.''

Hodgen has developed his own ethical standards - ``a simple set of rules'' that he calls his ``double-based litmus test.''

The test consists of two questions that Hodgen asks himself before every experiment: Will it meet an unmet need of patients or their families? And will it help - or harm - society?

The test came in handy four years ago, when Hodgen and his colleagues at the Jones Institute learned how to determine the sex of test-tube embryos.

Hodgen's dilemma was whether to allow doctors at the Jones Institute clinic to employ the test for patients who wanted to pick the sex of their children.

He decided not to.

``It fails the second question,'' he explains. ``If I value being a man and a woman as equal, then I cannot use the precious resources of medical science for the sole purpose of helping a couple have a boy or a girl.'' ILLUSTRATION: BILL TIERNAN

FILE PHOTO

Dr. Gary Hodgen asks a two-pronged question of scientific advances:

Will it meet the needs of a patient and will it help or harm

society?

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