The clone wars: A reason online debate.

• Author: Stock, Gregory

WHAT IS THE CASE for allowing genetic and other biological manipulations with the potential to change human beings? As stem cell research, cloning, and other technologies develop, perhaps no other question is more central to our future as a species--and perhaps no other question is as hotly contested.

In the wake of the first meeting of the President's Council on Bioethics and as Congress considered new legislation on the matter, we invited two of the major players in the field to debate the issue on reason's Web site. Gregory Stock, who makes the affirmative case, is director of the Program of Medicine, Technology, and Society at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine. He is also the author of the new book Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (Houghton Mifflin). Arguing against genetic and biological manipulations is Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

The debate unfolded over the week of March 18-22, with each participant responding within hours of the other's posting. Readers interested in more information can visit www.reason.com/biclone.shtml, which includes links to reason's voluminous coverage of cloning and biotechnology. Of special interest is "Criminalizing Science," in which a transpartisan coalition of thinkers and commentators respond to a left-right alliance to outlaw "therapeutic cloning" and stigmatize genetic research.

Go Ahead and Clone

Don't cause real damage to assuage phantom fears.

Gregory Stock

THERE HAS BEEN A lot of hand wringing recently about cloning. Considering that not a single viable cloned human embryo has yet been created, that the arrival of a clinical procedure to do so seems quite distant, and that having a delayed identical twin (which is, after all, what a clone is) has limited appeal, why all the fuss?

The fuss arises because cloning has become a proxy for broader fears about the new technologies emerging from our unraveling of human biology. Critics like Francis Fukuyama imagine that if we can stop cloning we can head off possibilities like human enhancement, but they're dreaming. As we decipher our biology and learn to modify it, we are learning to modify ourselves--and we will do so. No laws will stop this.

Embryo selection, for example, is a mere spin-off from widely supported medical research of a sort that leaves no trail and is feasible in thousands of labs throughout the world. Any serious attempt to block such research will simply increase the potential dangers of upcoming technologies by driving the work out of sight, blinding us to early indications of any medical or social problems.

The best reason not to curb interventions that many people see as safe and beneficial, however, is not that such a ban would be dangerous but that it would be wrong. A ban would prevent people from making choices aimed at improving their lives that would hurt no one. Such choices should be allowed. It is hard for me to see how a society that pushes us to stay healthy and vital could justify, for instance, trying to stop people from undergoing a genetic therapy or consuming a drug cocktail aimed at retarding aging. Imposing such a ban requires far more compelling logic than the assertion that we should not play God or that, as Fukuyama has suggested, it is wrong to try to transcend a "natural" human life span.

What's more, a serious effort to block beneficial technologies that might change our natures would require policies so harsh and intrusive that they would cause far greater harm than is feared from the technologies themselves. If the War on Drugs, with its vast resources and sad results, has been unable to block people's access to deleterious substances, the government has no hope of withholding access to technologies that many regard as beneficial. It would be a huge mistake to start down this path, because even without aggressive enforcement, such bans would effectively reserve the technologies for the affluent and privileged. When abortion was illegal in various states, the rich did not suffer; they just traveled to more-permissive locales.

Restricting emerging technologies for screening embryos would feed deep class divisions. Laboratories can now screen a six-cell human embryo by teasing out a single cell, reading its genes, and letting parents use the results to decide whether to implant or discard the embryo. In Germany such screening is criminal. But this doesn't deny the technology to affluent Germans who want it: They take a trip to Brussels or London, where it is legal. As such screenings become easier and more informative, genetic disease could be gradually relegated to society's disadvantaged. We need to start thinking about how to make the tests more, not less, accessible.

But let's cut to the chase. If parents can easily and safely choose embryos, won't they pick ones with predispositions toward various talents and temperaments, or even enhanced performance? Of course. It is too intrusive to have the government second-guessing such decisions. British prohibitions of innocuous choices like the sex of a child are a good example of undesirable government intrusion. Letting parents who strongly desire a girl (or boy) be sure to have one neither injures the resulting child nor causes gender imbalances in Western countries.

Sure, a few interventions will arise that virtually everyone would find troubling, but we can wait until actual problems appear before moving to control them. These coming reproductive technologies are not like nuclear weapons, which can suddenly vaporize large numbers of innocent bystanders. We have the luxury of feeling our way forward, seeing what problems develop, and carefully responding to them.

The real danger we face today is not that new biological technologies will occasionally cause injury but that opponents will use vague, abstract threats to our values to justify unwarranted political incursions that delay the medical advances growing out of today's basic research. If, out of concern over cloning, the U.S. Congress succeeds in criminalizing embryonic stem cell research that might bring treatments for Alzheimer's disease or diabetes--and Fukuyama lent his name to a petition supporting such laws--there would be real victims: present and future sufferers from those diseases.

We should hasten medical research, not stop it. We are devoting massive resources to the life sciences not out of idle curiosity but in an effort to penetrate our biology and learn to use this knowledge to better our lives. We should press ahead. Of course, the resultant technologies will pose challenges: They stand to revolutionize health care and medicine, transform great swaths of our economy, alter the way we conceive our children, change the way we manage our moods, and even extend our life spans.

The possibilities now emerging will force us to confront the question of what it means to be a human being. But however uneasy these new technologies make us, if we wish to continue to lead the way in shaping the human future we must actively explore them. The challenging question...