The moral case against cloning for biomedical research .

Our colleagues who joined in Part III in making the case for cloning for biomedical research began their analysis by describing the medical promise of such research. Those of us who maintain--for both principled and prudential reasons-that cloning for biomedical research should not be pursued similarly begin by acknowledging that substantial human goods might be gained from this research. Although it would be wrong to speak in ways that encourage false hope in those who are ill, as if a cure were likely in the near future, we who oppose such research take seriously its potential for one day yielding substantial (and perhaps unique) medical benefits. Even apart from more distant possibilities for advances in regenerative medicine, there are more immediate possibilities for progress in basic research and for developing models to study different diseases. All of us whose lives benefit enormously from medical advances that began with basic research know how great is our collective stake in continued scientific investigations. Only for very serious reasons--to avoid moral wrongdoing, to avoid harm to society, and to avoid foolish or unnecessary risks--should progress toward increased knowledge and advances that might relieve suffering or cure disease be slowed.

We also observe, however, that the realization of these medical benefits--like all speculative research and all wagers about the future--remains uncertain. There are grounds for questioning whether the proposed benefits of cloning for biomedical research will be realized. And there may be other morally unproblematic ways to achieve similar scientific results and medical benefits. For example, promising results in research with non-embryonic and adult stem cells suggest that scientists may be able to make progress in regenerative medicine without engaging in cloning for biomedical research. We can move forward with other, more developed forms of human stem cell research and with animal cloning. We can explore other routes for solving the immune rejection problem or to finding valuable cellular models of human disease. [Endnote vii. We are especially impressed by the promise of the research of Dr. Catherine Verfaillie and her group, showing the stability and multipotency of cells derived from bone marrow of animals and human adults. Should this work prove successful, it might serve all of the purposes said to require cells from cloned embryos. See presentation by Dr. Verfaillie at the April 25, 2002, meeting of the Council (transcript on the Council's website, www.bioethics.gov) and the papers cited in endnotes 3 and 4 to this chapter.] Where such morally innocent alternatives exist, one could argue that the burden of persuasion lies on proponents to show not only that cloned embryo research is promising or desirable but that it is necessary to gain the sought-for medical benefits. Indeed, the Nuremberg Code of research ethics enunciates precisely this principle--that experimentation should be "such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study." Because of all the scientific uncertainties--and the many possible avenues of research--that burden cannot at present be met.

But, we readily concede, these same uncertainties mean that no one--not the scientists, not the moralists, and not the patients whose suffering we all hope to ameliorate--can know for certain which avenues of research will prove most successful. Research using cloned embryos may in fact, as we said above, yield knowledge and benefits unobtainable by any other means.

With such possible benefits in view, what reasons could we have for saying "no" to cloning for biomedical research? Why not leave this possible avenue of medical progress open? Why not put the cup to our lips? In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare has Leontes, King of Silicia, explain why one might not. (8)

There may be in the cup A spider steep'd, and one may drink, depart, And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge Is not infected; but if one present The abhorr'd ingredient to his eye, make known How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider. To discern the spider in the cup is to see the moral reality of cloning for biomedical research differently. It is to move beyond questions of immediately evident benefits or harms alone toward deeper questions about what an ongoing program of cloning for biomedical research would mean. In part, this approach compels us to think about embryo research generally, but cloning (even for research purposes alone) raises its own special concerns, since only cloned embryos could one day become cloned children. We need to consider and articulate the reasons why, despite the possibility of great benefits, society should nevertheless turn away and not drink from this cup, and why the reasons for "drinking with limits" (offered by our colleagues in Position Number One above) are finally not persuasive.

Our analysis proceeds along three pathways: what we owe to the embryo; what we owe to society; and what we owe to the suffering. We differ, among ourselves, on the relative importance of the various arguments presented below. But we all agree that moral objections to the research itself and prudential considerations about where it is likely to lead suggest that we should oppose cloning for biomedical research, albeit with regret.

What We Owe to the Embryo

The embryo is, and perhaps will always be, something of a puzzle to us. In its rudimentary beginnings, it is so unlike the human beings we know and live with that it hardly seems to be one of us; yet, the fact of our own embryonic origin evokes in us respect for the wonder of emerging new human life. Even in the midst of much that is puzzling and uncertain, we would not want to lose that respect or ignore what we owe to the embryo.

The cell synthesized by somatic cell nuclear transfer, no less than the fertilized egg, is a human organism in its germinal stage. [Endnote viii. That the embryo in question is produced by cloning and not by the fertilization of an egg should not, in our view, lead us to treat it differently. The cloned embryo is different in its origins, but not in its possible destiny, from a normal embryo. Were it brought to term it too would indisputably be a member of the human species. We caution against defining the cloned embryo into a "non-embryo"--especially when science provides no warrant for doing so.] It is not just a "clump of cells" but an integrated, self-developing whole, capable (if all goes well) of the continued organic development characteristic of human beings. To be sure, the embryo does not yet have, except in potential, the full range of characteristics that distinguish the human species from others, but one need not have those characteristics in evidence in order to belong to the species. And of course human beings at some other stages of development--early in life, late in life, at any stage of life if severely disabled--do not forfeit their humanity simply for want of these distinguishing characteristics. We may observe different points in the life story of any human being--a beginning filled mostly with potential, a zenith at which the organism is in full flower, a decline in which only a residue remains of what is most distinctively human. But none of these points is itself the human being. That being is, rather, an organism with a continuous history. From zygote to irreversible coma, each human life is a single personal history.

But this fact still leaves unanswered the question of whether all stages of a human being's life have equal moral standing. Might there be sound biological or moral reasons for according the early-stage embryo only partial human worth or even none at all? If so, should such embryos be made available or even explicitly created for research that necessarily requires their destruction--especially if very real human good might come from it? Some of us who oppose cloning for biomedical research hold that efforts to assign to the embryo a merely intermediate and developing moral status--that is, more humanly significant than other human cells, 'but less deserving of respect and protection than a human fetus or infant--are both biologically and morally unsustainable, and that the embryo is in fact fully "one of us": a human life in process, an equal member of the species Homo sapiens in the embryonic stage of his or her natural development. All of us who oppose going forward with cloning for biomedical research believe that it is incoherent and self-contradictory for our colleagues (in Position Number One) to claim that human embryos deserve "special respect" and to endorse nonetheless research that requires the creation, use, and destruction of these organisms, especially when done routinely and on a large scale.

The case for treating the early-stage embryo as simply the moral equivalent of...