CLONING LAW
Cloning may not yet be illegal, but, rest assured, Congress is on the case. "We'll have an anti-human-cloning bill by fall," says Representative Cliff Stearns (R-Florida), who in April introduced a proposal to ban federal funding for human-cloning research. Legislators are spending the summer reviewing it and seven other anti-cloning bills, which even the most conservative scientists describe as extremist.
As Stearns sees it, cloning is more sci-fi than science: "When you do a clone, there are these tentacles removed from the ovum." Society, he says, could wind up having "categories of people who didn't have these tentacles, so there might be superior and inferior people. If you met them and knew they were cloned, how would you deal with them?"
By "tentacles," Stearns presumably means a donor egg's mitochondrial DNA, something that cells - cloned or otherwise - must have to function. Douglas Melton, chair of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard, is concerned that the congressman may not have all the facts straight - especially worrisome when one considers that Stearns' proposed bill bans federal funding for all embryonic stem-cell research. "I'd like to think Stearns took advantage of the National Academy of Sciences before writing his bill," he says. "Lincoln created the academy to provide just that kind of advice." Melton also blames scientists for not helping politicians understand these ideas.
At a spring subcommittee hearing, biologists - including MIT's Rudolf Jaenisch, who opposes human reproductive cloning because of safety concerns but supports using cloned embryos for organ-transplant research, for example - pleaded with Congress to limit legislation to a ban on implanting a cloned embryo into a woman's uterus. A bill initiated by Representative Brian Kerns (R-Indiana) is the only one that bans this, though it allows for everything else. To read the full text of the bills, go to www.thomas.loc.gov.
MUST READ
Linux Inside
All Your Base Are Belong to Us
A Brush With AI
High-Voltage Connectivity
Ask Dr. Bob
People
TV Your Way
Making Dead Birds "The Deal of the Century"
Jargon Watch
McCurry's Multiplier Effect
Digicamouflage
Cranium Drive
InterCommunication Arts
Do You Copy?
Wired Index
Raw Data
