Christian Doctors Slam ''Dolly'' Creator's Human Cloning License
''All human cloning is intrinsically wrong and should be outlawed. However, the creation of cloned human embryos destined for experimentation and subsequent destruction is particularly abhorrent''
The nation’s largest association of faith-based physicians slammed “Dolly” creator Ian Wilmut’s plan to clone human beings for medical research, calling his effort a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” on Tuesday, February 08, 2005.
"It's dressing a wolf in sheep's clothing to claim that you're somehow helping humanity when in fact you're killing living human beings," noted David Stevens, M.D., Executive Director of the 17,000-member Christian Medical Association. "So-called 'therapeutic cloning' is hardly therapeutic for the living human subjects destroyed in the process."
The CMA’s comments were made in light of Tuesday's announcement that British regulators granted Wilmut, who led the team that created the first cloned mammal, Dolly, at Scotland’s Roslin Institute in 1996, the permission to experiment with stem cells and clone human embryos.
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Although Wilmut does not intend to clone full grown human babies, he plans to extract stem cells from patients with such diseases and implant them in unfertilized eggs to clone embryos. Wilmut and his group will then harvest stem cells from the embryo to grow the specific motor neurones (long nerves that connect to the brain) for study, and will then toss out embryos involved in the research. According to the Associated Press, this technique will not be used to correct the diseases, which is caused by the death of motor neurons, but will only be used as a study of the cells that could help develop future treatments.
The cloning technique, called cell nuclear replacement, was the same kind he used to "create" Dolly in 1996.
Not surprisingly, news of Wilmut's newly acquired license provoked harsh criticism from Pro-life and pro-family groups around the world.
"Are we supposed to be appeased by Professor Wilmut's declarations that the human embryos will be destroyed after experimentation and that his team has no intention of producing cloned babies?" asked Julia Millington of the London-based ProLife Alliance.
"All human cloning is intrinsically wrong and should be outlawed. However, the creation of cloned human embryos destined for experimentation and subsequent destruction is particularly abhorrent."
According to the Associated Press, Wilmut defended his move after the announcement in Edinburgh, Scotland.
"We all take for granted the very much healthier life that we have now compared with people 100 years ago," he said. "I think that the majority of people support this type of research and hope it will be successful in helping to bring useful treatment for diseases like motor neuron disease."
Wilmut’s license is the second one approved since Britain became the first country to legalize research cloning in 2001. The first was granted in August to scientists that hope to use cloning to create insulin-producing cells for transplant into diabetics.
In the United States, embryonic stem-cell research and human cloning has been some of the decisive “moral values” factors that helped bring millions of Christian conservatives out to the polls. During his 2005 State of the Union Address, President Bush pushed for a “culture of life” that does not support medical research on embryonic stem-cells.
Currently, California is the only state that has passed a state-wide initiative to fund embryonic stem cell research. And while there is no ban on embryonic stem cell research in the nation, government funding for cloning is strictly prohibited; federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research is also reserved to a limited number of embryonic stem cell lines.
Supporters of embryonic stem-cell research contend such studies have the potential to cure a wide variety of neuron disease, including Parkinson’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
"It's about 135 years since (motor neuron disease) was first characterized and here we are, more than a century later, and we still don't know the cause of over 95 percent of cases. We haven't got a diagnostic test for the disease and we've made very modest inroads in slowing the disease progression," said Dr. Brian Dickie, director of research at the London-based Motor Neuron Disease Association and avid proponent of embryonic stem cell research.
"This opens up opportunities on three fronts: to understand how motor neurons become sick and die, to identify genetic causes of the disease and to rapidly screen new drugs," he said to the Associated Press.
However, Opponents say embryonic stem-cell research and is an unnecessary and amoral addition to adult stem-cell research – a process that requires neither the disposal of hundreds of embryos nor the destruction of human life. Adult stem-cell research has proven many times to be a promising and effective field that has yet to be fully explored.
CMA’s Associate Director Gene Rudd explained that the issue goes beyond the ethics of killing embryos.
"Even apart from the overriding moral concern about destroying living human beings in a utilitarian approach to medicine, no scientist can guarantee that a cloned human embryo will not eventually be implanted to be born,” said Rudd, on Tuesday. “A cloned human embryo would look exactly like a normally conceived human embryo, and the technology to implant that human embryo is already commonplace."
