With the US government bogged down in its attempts to regulate investigations into the cloning of humans, the nation's most fertile state for biotechnology research is weighing in on the issue.
The California Legislature is in the midst of crafting a bill that would place a five-year moratorium on efforts to clone humans. The legislation, SB 1344, by Senator Patrick Johnston, would make it illegal to clone a human or to buy or sell a human ovum, zygote, embryo, or fetus for the purposes of cloning. Institutions violating the law would face a fine of US$1 million and a loss of professional licenses; individuals would be fined $250,000, or double the profit they make off their efforts, whichever amount is greater.
A companion resolution passed by the state Senate in June and the Assembly on 2 September calls upon the state director of Health Services to appoint an advisory panel, similar to the Clinton administration's National Bioethics Advisory Commission, to evaluate the implications of human cloning and make recommendations to the Legislature and governor by the end of 2001.
As a birthplace and center of the biotech industry, the Golden State should look to lead the national debate on the issue, said John Miller, consultant to the state Senate Health and Human Services Committee.
"California is a little different from the federal government. It has the scientific capacity to do this," Miller said Tuesday. "We have a bill that looks at the broader issues that will encourage discussion of cloning."
By imposing a cloning moratorium, the scientific, medical ethics, and religious communities and government experts would have a chance to explore legal, scientific, and philosophical issues. But the state must take care not to close down crucial areas of research, said Dr. Bernard Lo, a medical ethicist at the University of California, San Francisco.
Miller said the proposed legislation takes care not to interfere with other aspects of cloning research.
Much of the cloning research at universities and in the biotech industry centers on growing tissues for use in transplants, or duplicating human proteins such as telomerase to make it possible to manipulate cell functions. Cloning a whole human being would be far more complicated. Partly because of that complexity, the industry has declared opposition to such research for now.
"There are so many unanswered questions on the long-term impact of cloning of animals," said UCSF's Lo, who is also a member of the national bioethics panel.
Chief among the questions is whether a clone of an adult animal experiences an accelerated aging process. Lo said scientists believe but are not certain that the fusion of the somatic cell with the egg turns back the clock on a cell. This will be one of the aspects scientists at Scotland's Roslin Institute will be studying in their examination of the world-renowned cloned sheep, Dolly.
Another big issue is that of mutations and a cloned animal's susceptibility to cancer. If the adult animal producing the cell had a predisposition to cancer, scientists want to see whether there is a chance that the resulting clone could wind up with the same vulnerability.
But whether the five years specified in the California law will be enough time to answer these questions sufficiently is another issue. What Lo and others hope for is time and space to look at cloning of adult animals in much the same way that researchers look at new surgical techniques and pharmaceuticals, a process that can take 10 years.
