Vantage Point:
Myths and realities of cloning research

By DAVID MAGNUS, PhD

Last week’s news that a team of researchers in South Korea successfully derived embryonic stem cells from a cloned human embryo raises many pressing issues. Making babies is not one of them, despite what some critics of cloning research say.

Right after the announcement of the first success in deriving stem cells from a cloned human embryo, debate began about how the technology will inevitably lead to the cloning of children. There is an enormous gap, however, between the creation of a cloned embryo and a baby. Given the difficulties in producing cloned primates, there is virtually no chance that a cloned embryo produced today could ever become a child. The researchers are not attempting to produce cloned children. Their interest is in developing cures for diseases and disabilities.

This highlights the problem with the other objection to this research. It is held by some that the cloned embryos that produce the stem cells have the same moral status as children and that this research amounts to murder. We should reject this view. These small clumps of cells that are outside of the body do not have the ability to ever become more than what they are. Weighing the value of something that will never develop beyond a ball of cells versus the patients we see at Stanford Hospital and Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital is not a difficult choice. A promising avenue of research that may one day help alleviate the suffering of patients who now die awaiting organs or any of dozens of other afflictions must be developed.

The most important ethical issues raised by the Korean announcement are what it presages about where the technology is going to be developed. U.S. policy virtually prohibits expending federal funding on all forms of embryonic stem cell research using cloned embryos or otherwise. This means that this promising area of basic research is to be left in the United States to the private sector and (increasingly) other countries.

Scientists here at Stanford and other universities are finding their efforts to pursue this promising avenue of research stymied. Without the resources of the NIH, or alternatively from a major investment from the state, U.S. stem cell research will continue to fall behind. If legislation written by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., (which was passed by the House of Representatives last year) becomes law then even private-sector research would be banned. This bill would even prohibit importation of cures derived from stem cells – raising the specter that U.S. health care will fall behind the rest of the world.

The research conducted by the team in South Korea also highlights a problem with limiting federal funding. The researchers overseas obtained informed consent and got approval for their procedures and forms by an Institutional Review Board, or IRB. If this research took place in the United States by a private biotech company, it would fall outside the federal regulatory apparatus. Depending on where the research was conducted, there would be no mandatory IRB oversight or even informed consent from those who donated the DNA or eggs that produced the embryos. Fortunately, in California, we have state law that offers some protection, ensuring those who donated the DNA or eggs that produced the embryos would know what was going on if a private company did the same experiments here.

It is important to remember that the fruits of stem cell research will not be realized for a long time to come and it would be a mistake to race to clinical trials before the basic research is done that allows us to move forward in a safe and effective manner. But that makes it all the more imperative that we allow government funding of a research area that may one day answer the prayers of our patients.

David Magnus is co-director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. A version of this piece, co-written with Arthur Caplan, PhD, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, appeared Friday in the San Jose Mercury News.