Deformed baby risk in human cloning

By ANGELA GREGORY

Imminent attempts to clone humans pose huge risks of creating deformed babies, say New Zealand medical experts.

Medical ethics and human reproduction specialists warn that the proposal by an Italian doctor and American scientist to try human cloning is immoral and runs the risk of creating monstrous failures.

They also fear that public revulsion over the issue will endanger tissue engineering research that could help many sufferers of degenerative diseases.

And many religious leaders who spoke to the Herald said they believed the price of human cloning was too high.

The Rev Dr Neil Vaney, a Marist priest and bioethics lecturer, said the dangers of cloning were profound and threatened basic human values.

"One of the greatest values we've fought for over the last few centuries is the dignity, the autonomy and the value of each individual human life."

While many scientists and doctors had a deep sense of humanity, some let their ethics become obscured by scientific possibility, said Dr Vaney.

"Some, I think, get carried away with what's possible, pushing the boundaries, going beyond the human and creating we don't know what."

The Cardinal Archbishop of Wellington, the Most Rev Tom Williams, said the idea of human cloning was abhorrent.

"It's a procedure that flies in the face of nature."

Cardinal Williams said the proposed cloning was completely at odds with the weight of scientific and ethical opinion.

The head of an Auckland medical research centre, Professor Peter Gluckman, said the intended human cloning was morally and scientifically disgusting.

"This particular application is just crazy."

Professor Gluckman, the former dean of the Auckland Medical School, said there were serious ethical and legal issues surrounding what appeared to be the "worst kind of egotistical approach" to serious scientific matters.

While he believed in the need to help people with reproductive problems, there were other ways of fertilising eggs.

A lack of extensive animal experimentation to show that human cloning was safe led to the likelihood of producing malformed infants who would prematurely age.

Professor Gluckman said the moral territory surrounding human cloning had not been explored, and it needed a lot more reflection and discussion in the wider community.

He was concerned that the media "hype"could lead to public misunderstanding of cloning. It was "not about producing a generation of Saddam Husseins" because environmental influences would always preclude identical people.

But such fears could jeopardise animal cloning experiments that had enormous applications in human medicine, he said.

To halt that research would be disastrous for the future of tissue engineering, where stem cell biology could be used to grow adult cells for procedures such as liver and pancreas replacements.

David Seedhouse, professor of health and social ethics at the Auckland University of Technology, said human cloning was inevitable.

"Somebody is going to do it, and I don't think anybody can stop it happening."

Professor Seedhouse said he was not happy with the risks being taken and thought it unfair to offer such a chance to people desperate about their infertility.

"It is entirely experimental and would not go through ethics committees in the UK, US or New Zealand."

The director of the Bioethics Centre at Otago Medical School, Professor Donald Evans, also feared that hysteria whipped up by the publicity could result in a complete cloning ban in New Zealand.

Professor Evans was concerned that two bills now "wallowing" before Parliament's health select committee already proposed such a ban.

"We could find ourselves banning something we don't want to ban."

Professor Evans said therapeutic cloning had potential uses for people with Alzheimer's disease, burns victims, those suffering from kidney failure or with heart problems, and other degenerative diseases.

He was opposed to human cloning while the risks were so high, but did not rule out its future use entirely.

Feature: Cloning humans

Professor Severino Antinori

Human Cloning Foundation

bioethics.net

Religious Tolerance looks at cloning