Human Cloning and Human Dignity:
An Ethical Inquiry

Table of Contents

Historical Aspects of Cloning

The previous chapter located human cloning in its larger human context. This chapter provides a brief history of human cloning, both as a scientific matter and as a subject of public discussion, debate, and legislation.1 Although we present only selected highlights, rather than a comprehensive account, we seek to enable the reader to place the present debate about cloning and this report into their proper historical setting. Until recently, all discussion of human cloning concentrated exclusively on the prospect of clonal reproduction, the production of individuals genetically virtually identical to previously existing ones. Our historical account here reflects that emphasis. Yet we will also consider the emerging interest in cloning-for-biomedical-research, a prospect connected to the recent isolation of embryonic stem cells and their potential for the understanding and treatment of human disease and disability.

Scientific Milestones

As a scientific and technical possibility, human cloning has emerged as an outgrowth of discoveries or innovations in developmental biology, genetics, assisted reproductive technologies, animal breeding, and, most recently, research on embryonic stem cells. Assisted reproductive techniques in humans accomplished the in vitro fertilization of a human egg, yielding a zygote and developing embryo that could be successfully implanted into a woman's uterus to give rise to a live-born child. Animal breeders developed and refined these techniques with a view to perpetuating particularly valuable animals and maintaining laboriously identified genomes. Most recently, the isolation of embryonic stem cells and their subsequent in vitro differentiation into many different cell types have opened up possibilities for repairing and replacing diseased or nonfunctioning tissue, and thus possible research uses for cloned human embryos.

The German embryologist Hans Spemann conducted what many consider to be the earliest "cloning" experiments on animals. Spemann was interested in answering a fundamental question of biological development: does each differentiated cell retain the full complement of genetic information present initially in the zygote? In the late 1920s, he tied off part of a cell containing the nucleus from a salamander embryo at the sixteen-cell stage and allowed the single cell to divide, showing that the nucleus of that early embryo could, in effect, "start over." In a 1938 book, Embryonic Development and Induction, Spemann wondered whether more completely differentiated cells had the same capacity and speculated about the possibility of transferring the nucleus from a differentiated cell – taken from either a later-stage embryo or an adult organism – into an enucleated egg. As he explained it: "Decisive information about this question may perhaps be afforded by an experiment which appears, at first sight, to be somewhat fantastical. This experiment might possibly show that even nuclei of differentiated cells can initiate normal development in the egg protoplasms." 2 But Spemann did not know how to conduct such an experiment.

Research with frogs fourteen years later encouraged progress toward the "fantastical experiment." In 1952, the American embryologists Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King first successfully transferred nuclei from early embryonic cells of leopard frogs to enucleated leopard frog eggs. The "activated egg" began to divide and develop, became a multicellular embryo, and then became a tadpole. 3 Embryologists in other laboratories successfully repeated these initial experiments on different species of frogs. But additional experience also showed that the older and more differentiated a donor cell becomes, the less likely it is that its nucleus would be able to direct development.

In 1962, the British developmental biologist John Gurdon reported that he had produced sexually mature frogs by transferring nuclei from intestinal cells of tadpoles into enucleated frog eggs.4 The experiments had a low success rate and remained controversial. Gurdon continued this work in the 1970s, and he was able to produce tadpoles by transferring the nucleus of adult frog skin cells into enucleated frog eggs. Later experiments established that many factors in addition to the intact nucleus are crucial to success (see Chapter Four for further discussion). In retrospect, it is surprising that any of these earlier experiments produced positive results.⁵ But despite their low success rates, these experiments demonstrated that the nucleus retained its full complement of genetic information and encouraged later investigators to explore mammalian cloning.

The birth of Louise Brown in 1978, the first baby conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF), was also an important milestone, because it demonstrated that human birth was possible from eggs that were fertilized outside the body and then implanted into the womb. As for the possibility of cloning animals from adult cells – especially mammals – the work in the intervening years focused largely on the reprogramming of gene expression in somatic cells, the transfer of nuclei taken from embryos in mammals (beginning with mice in the 1980s), and finally the work of Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute with adult nuclei, which led to the birth of Dolly on July 5, 1996. Since then, similar success has been achieved in cloning other mammalian species, including cattle, goats, pigs, mice, cats, and rabbits (see Chapter Four).

The animal cloners did not set out to develop techniques for cloning humans. Wilmut's goal was to replicate or perpetuate animals carrying a valuable genome (for example, sheep that had been genetically modified to produce medically valuable proteins in their milk). Others, such as the cloners of the kitten CC, were interested in commercial ventures for the cloning of pets.6 Yet the techniques developed in animals have encouraged a small number of infertility therapists to contemplate and explore efforts to clone human children. And, following the announcement in 1998 by James Thomson and his associates of their isolation of human embryonic stem cells, there emerged an interest in cloned human embryos, not for reproductive uses but as a powerful tool for research into the nature and treatment of human disease.

Human Cloning from Popular Literature to Public Policy:
From Brave New World to the Birth of Dolly

Technological novelties are often imagined and discussed in literature, especially in science fiction, before they are likely or even possible in practice. This has certainly been the case with human cloning, whose place in the popular imagination precedes the earliest successful animal cloning experiments. Perhaps the most famous early modern account of human cloning is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), where natural human procreation has become a thing of the past, and where babies are produced in identical batches through "Bokanovsky's Process." As the novelist tells it:

One egg, one embryo, one adult – normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide . . . becoming anywhere from eight to ninety-six embryos – a prodigious improvement, you will agree, on nature. Identical twins – but not in piddling twos and threes . . . Standard men and women; in uniform batches.7

The relevance or irrelevance of Huxley's vision to the dilemmas of the present is of course a matter of serious disagreement. Some believe that fears of a "Brave New World" are fantasy divorced from both the political realities of modern liberal democracy and the facts of science. Others believe the book remains a prescient warning of where biological self-manipulation could take us – which is to say, to a world where family is obsolete, life is engineered to order in the laboratory, and human beings have reduced themselves to well-satisfied human animals.

In the late 1960s, following John Gurdon's successful cloning experiments, a more focused debate on both the likelihood and the ethical and social implications of human cloning began among scientists, theologians, and ethicists. At this time, the still hypothetical possibility of cloning humans was considered as a part of a broader eugenic project to improve the genetic stock of humans as a species. In a famous article published in The American Naturalist in 1966, entitled "Experimental Genetics and Human Evolution," Nobel laureate biologist Joshua Lederberg described what he took to be the prospects of "clonal reproduction." "Experimentally," he wrote, "we know of successful nuclear transplantation from diploid somatic as well as germline cells into enucleated amphibian eggs. There is nothing to suggest any particular difficulty about accomplishing this in mammals or man, though it will rightly be admired as a technical tour-de-force when it is first implemented." He also predicted "there will be little delay between demonstration and use."8

While Lederberg concluded his essay by exhorting his readers not to "mistake comment for advocacy," he clearly believed that clonal reproduction might offer a number of human benefits or improvements. "If a superior individual (and presumably then genotype) is identified, why not copy it directly, rather than suffer all the risks of recombinational disruption, including those of sex," he asked. "The same solace is accorded the carrier of genetic disease: why not be sure of an exact copy of yourself rather than risk a homozygous segregant;i or at worst copy your spouse and allow some degree of biological parenthood." He described other possibilities – such as "the free exchange of organ transplants with no concern for graft rejection" and more efficient communication between individuals in "stressed occupations."⁹

In the end, Lederberg argued that "tempered clonality" – a mix of clonal and sexual reproduction – might, at least from a biological standpoint, "allow the best of both worlds – we would at least enjoy being able to observe the experiment of discovering whether a second Einstein would outdo the first one." Nevertheless, he acknowledged the possibility for "social frictions" and ethical dilemmas that might result from clonal reproduction – including whether "anyone could conscientiously risk the crucial experiment, the first attempt to clone a man." He suggested that the "mingling of individual human chromosomes with other mammals assures a gradualistic enlargement of the field and lowers the threshold of optimism or arrogance, particularly if cloning in other mammals gives incompletely predictable results." And he feared that social policy might become based on "the accidents of the first advertised examples" rather than "well-debated principles." 10

In 1970, the theologian and ethicist Paul Ramsey responded to Lederberg's portrait of human cloning – and, more generally, to the prospects for human self-modification – in a book called Fabricated Man: The Ethics of Genetic Control. He argued that human cloning would violate the ethical responsibilities of both science and parenthood: it would involve experiments on the child-to-be; it would transform parenthood into manufacture; and it would burden children with the genetic predisposition of their "maker" and so deny the cloned child a unique independence in the very act of bringing him or her to life. "[T]o attempt to soar so high above an eminently human parenthood," Ramsey wrote, "is inevitably to fall far below – into a vast technological alienation of man .. The entire rationalization of procreation – its replacement by replication – can only mean the abolition of man's embodied personhood." 11

Ramsey believed that such a willingness to experiment on human life – or to create sub-humans-showed how the effort to perfect and improve humankind through genetic control leads in fact to ethical coarsening and to a disregard for actual human beings. "In the present age," he wrote, "the attempt will be made to deprive us of our wits by comparing objections to schemes of progressive genetic engineering or cloning men to earlier opposition to inoculations, blood transfusions, or the control of malaria. These things are by no means to be compared: the practice of medicine in the service of life is one thing; man's unlimited self-modification of the genetic conditions of life would be quite another matter."12

The debate over human cloning and genetic manipulation continued in the early 1970s. The Nobel laureate geneticist James D. Watson testified before Congress in 1971 on the subject of human cloning. He described the science that was taking us there, including John Gurdon's success in cloning frogs and the work of R. G. Edwards and P. S. Steptoe "in working out the conditions for routine test-tube conception of human eggs."13 "Human embryological development," Watson observed, "need no longer be a process shrouded in secrecy. It can become instead an event wide-open to a variety of experimental manipulations." Watson called for the creation of national and international committees to promote "wide-ranging discussion . at the informal as well as formal legislative level, about the manifold problems which are bound to arise if test-tube conception becomes a common occurrence." ¹⁴ "This is a decision not for the scientists at all," he said. "It is a decision of the general public – do you want this or not?" and something that "if we do not think about it now, the possibility of our having a free choice will one day suddenly be gone."¹⁵

In 1972, Willard Gaylin, a psychiatrist and co-founder of the newly formed Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences (later called the Hastings Center), made James Watson's warnings about cloning even more dramatic – with a New York Times Magazine article titled "The Frankenstein Myth Becomes a Reality – We Have the Awful Knowledge to Make Exact Copies of Human Beings." Gaylin hoped that the prospect of human cloning would awaken the public – and the scientific community – to the larger ethical implications of the life sciences.16 The same year, biologist and ethicist Leon R. Kass published an essay in The Public Interest called "Making Babies – The New Biology and the 'Old' Morality," which addressed the prospect of both in vitro fertilization and human cloning, and wondered whether "by tampering with and confounding [our] origins, we are involved in nothing less than creating a new conception of what it means to be human."¹⁷

In stark contrast to Gaylin and Kass, ethicist Joseph Fletcher argued that human cloning would not be dehumanizing at all, but would, in a number of circumstances, serve the good of both society and individuals. In his 1974 book The Ethics of Genetic Control: Ending Reproductive Roulette, he argued that "Good reasons in general for cloning are that it avoids genetic diseases, bypasses sterility, predetermines an individual's gender, and preserves family likenesses. It wastes time to argue over whether we should do it or not; the real moral question is when and why."18 For Fletcher – unlike Ramsey, Gaylin, and Kass – genetic control would serve the human end of self-mastery and self-improvement, it would improve the quality of life for individuals, and it would aid the progress of the human species. Gunther Stent, a molecular biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, echoed this view that human cloning would contribute to human perfection. As he wrote in a 1974 article in Nature: "To oppose human cloning . . . is to betray the Western dream of the City of God. All utopian visionaries, from Thomas More to Karl Marx, think of their perfect societies as being populated not by men but by angels that embody all of the best and none of the worst human attributes." ¹⁹ With cloning, he suggested, such a city might one day be possible.

For several years, cloning remained a topic for fiction and philosophy, but fantasy had yet to turn into fact. In 1978, in a book titled In His Image: The Cloning of a Man, science writer David Rorvik claimed that he was involved in a secret project to clone a millionaire in Montana named "Max."20 The book caused a flurry of reaction – ranging from horror to amusement to nearly universal skepticism and denunciation in the scientific community – and eventually led to hearings before Congress on May 31, 1978. Robert Briggs, who with Thomas King cloned the first frog embryo from blastula frog cells in 1952, declared that the work in frogs demonstrated not that human cloning is now or imminently possible, but that "cloning in man or any other animal is not just a technical problem to be solved soon but may, in fact, never occur."²¹ James Watson, who just a few years earlier had urged a national conversation and possible legislation on human cloning because of the rapid advances in the science, declared that we would "certainly not [see the cloning of a man] in any of our lifetimes. I wouldn't be able to predict when we might see the cloning of a mouse, much less a man."²² Rorvik eventually admitted that the book was a hoax.

In the years that followed, claims and counter-claims of scientific advances in mammalian cloning – including the controversy beginning in 1981 over whether any of several independent laboratories had actually cloned mice – prompted more public reaction and discussion about the issue. But there was no sustained or widespread public interest, and cloning lost its prominent place within the bioethics literature. The President's Bioethics Commission, in its 1982 report Splicing Life, briefly discussed human cloning as well as IVF, but held that both were beyond the scope of that report because they could be considered reproductive technologies that did not necessarily involve modifying the genome (pp. 9-10). With regard to human cloning in particular, the report added that the possibility had received a good deal of public attention and it was therefore important to emphasize that even if it ever did become possible in humans, it would not result in an identical being.23

The National Institutes of Health Human Embryo Research Panel, which issued a report in 1994 on federal funding for research involving preimplantation human embryos, deemed research involving nuclear transplantation, without transfer of the resulting cloned embryo to a uterus, as one type of research that was acceptable for federal support. The report noted that the majority on this point was narrow, with nearly as many panel members concluding that the ethical implications of nuclear transplantation should be studied further before any such research could be acceptable for federal funding (Exec. Summ., p. xvii). In its discussion of cloning techniques, the panel noted that many different procedures are all called "cloning," and said in a footnote, "Popular notions of cloning derive from science fiction books and films that have more to do with cultural fantasies than actual scientific experiments." 24

Of course, there had been, in the meantime, continued scientific work in nuclear transplantation in animals – including mammals. And with the 1997 announcement of the cloning of Dolly, the prospect of human cloning once again became a prominent issue in public discussion, debate, and public life.

The Human Cloning Debate:
From Dolly to the Present

In late February 1997, Ian Wilmut and his team at the Roslin Institute in Scotland announced that they had, by means of somatic cell nuclear transfer, successfully cloned the first mammal from an adult somatic cell – Dolly the sheep. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair immediately denounced any attempts to clone a human being, and the President asked his National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) to report within ninety days on the scientific, ethical, and legal questions surrounding the prospect of human cloning. Congress likewise held a series of hearings – the first one on March 12, 1997. A widespread – though not universal – consensus emerged that attempts to clone a human being would at present be irresponsible and immoral. As Wilmut explained before Congress, "Our own experiments to clone sheep from adult mammary cells required us to produce 277 'reconstructed' embryos. Of these, twenty-nine were implanted into recipient ewes, and only one developed into a live lamb. In previous work with cells from embryos, three out of five lambs died soon after birth and showed developmental abnormalities. Similar experiments with humans would be totally unacceptable." 25

Most ethicists agreed, though for different reasons. All agreed that cloning attempts on human beings "at this time" would be reckless experiments on the child-to-be and therefore totally unjustified. Many stressed, as Ramsey, Gaylin, and Kass had done in the 1970s, that human cloning would undermine the human meaning of parenthood and identity; that it would mean a giant step toward genetic engineering, creating the first children whose genetic predisposition was known and selected in advance; and that it would turn procreation increasingly into a form of manufacture.26 In contrast, some bioethicists, including John Robertson and Ruth Macklin, believed that human cloning presented no inherent threat to public or private morality, that government had no legal authority or justification for banning clonal reproduction, and that it must be judged in terms of its particular uses, not dismissed outright.²⁷

At present, the use of this technique to create a child would be a premature experiment that would expose the fetus and the developing child to unacceptable risks. This in itself might be sufficient to justify a prohibition on cloning human beings at this time, even if such efforts were to be characterized as the exercise of a fundamental right to attempt to procreate.28

NBAC also pointed to other moral concerns "beyond the issue of the safety of the procedure," including "the potential psychological harms to children and effects on the moral, religious, and cultural values of society" that "merit further discussion." NBAC recommended a three-to-five-year federal moratorium on human cloning – stating that the consensus came from the fact that the technique was not yet safe – to be revisited and reevaluated after that time. "Whether upon such further deliberation our nation will conclude that the use of cloning techniques to create children should be allowed or permanently banned is, for the moment, an open question." 29

In early 1998, the United States Senate considered legislation, proposed by Republican Senators Christopher Bond of Missouri, Bill Frist of Tennessee, and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, to ban all human cloning permanently. Nearly all senators denounced clonal reproduction, but many believed that the proposed ban, which would have made it illegal to create human embryos by means of somatic cell nuclear transfer, would undermine potentially valuable scientific research. Democratic Senators Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Tom Harkin of Iowa led the opposition, with the widespread support of patient advocacy groups, scientific and medical organizations, and the biotechnology industry. As Senator Kennedy put it:

Every scientist in America understands the threat this legislation poses to critical medical research. Every American should understand it, too. . . . Congress can and should act to ban cloning of human beings during this session. But it should not act in haste, and it should not pass legislation that goes far beyond what the American people want or what the scientific and medical community understands is necessary or appropriate.30

The legislation died after heated debate, and the concern over human cloning temporarily lost urgency and subsided.

In November 1998, a new scientific discovery was unveiled that would soon provoke a different public policy debate, one that would become entangled with the ethical and social questions surrounding human cloning. James Thomson and John Gearhart separately announced the isolation of human embryonic stem cells – multipotent cells (see Glossary of Terms) derived from human embryos that they believed hold great promise for curing or treating many diseases and injuries. The discovery led to another wave of hearings on, and interest in, the ethics of biological science. It also renewed debate over whether embryo research should be eligible for public funding (since 1996, Congress had prohibited federal funding of research involving the destruction of human embryos). One subject under consideration was the possible future use of cloned human embryos for stem cell research, which some scientists believed might be uniquely useful for understanding embryological development and genetic disease and for possible use in stem cell therapies.

In August 2000 – after another NBAC study – President Clinton announced new guidelines that would have altered the ban on federal funding of embryo research. The new guidelines, proposed by the National Institutes of Health, stipulated that the agency would fund research on embryonic stem cells so long as public funds were not used to destroy the embryos, the embryos were left over from IVF clinics, and donors of the embryos consented to the research.

In early 2001, President George W. Bush announced that he would review these guidelines rather than implement them immediately.2 Around the same time, a number of pro-cloning groups and fertility doctors – including the Raelians, who believe that humans are the products of cloning by aliens – announced their intention to clone human beings by the end of the year. Other individuals and scientific organizations worked to protect possible cloning research from future restrictions, though some scientists (such as Rudolf Jaenisch and Ian Wilmut³¹ ) publicly argued against cloning-to-produce-children. A flurry of hearings on human cloning soon followed – the first one in the House of Representatives on March 28, 2001, and continuing in both the House and the Senate throughout the summer. The hearings addressed cloning-to-produce-children as well as issues related to cloning-for-biomedical-research.

Two general approaches to banning human cloning emerged. The first approach, proposed in a bill sponsored by Republican Representative David Weldon of Florida and Democratic Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan in the House, and Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana in the Senate, called for a ban on all human cloning, including the creation of cloned embryos for biomedical research. The second approach, proposed in a bill sponsored by Republican Senators Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Orrin Hatch of Utah and Democratic Senators Diane Feinstein of California and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, sought to prohibit human reproductive cloning, while allowing the use of cloning technology to produce stem cells, by making it illegal to implant or attempt to implant cloned human embryos "into a uterus or the functional equivalent of a uterus."

On July 31, 2001, the House of Representatives passed the Weldon – Stupak bill (the ban on all human cloning) by a vote of 265 to 162. In November 2001, scientists at Advanced Cell Technology, Inc., of Worcester, Massachusetts, one of the leading commercial advocates of cloning-for-biomedical-research, reported what they claimed were the first cloned human embryos. The announcement – along with continued debate on the possible use of cloned human embryos for stem cell research – left the issue in the United States Senate, where it stands as of this writing.

Meanwhile, the general public has consistently expressed the view that human cloning is wrong – most recently, a Gallup poll from May 2002 that showed opposition to cloning to produce a child at 90 percent, and opposition to "cloning of human embryos for use in medical research" at 61 percent. Asked about medical research using stem cells obtained from human embryos (with no mention of how the embryo was generated), 52 percent found it morally acceptable, while 51 percent found acceptable the "cloning of human cells from adults for use in medical research."32

In addition to activity at the federal level, many states have been active. As of this writing, twenty-two states have considered various policy alternatives on cloning, and six have passed legislation.3

Several nations, including Denmark, France, Norway, Spain, and Canada have passed or sought either partial or total bans. For example, in the United Kingdom, cloning-to-produce-children is forbidden but cloned embryos up to fourteen days old may be used in biomedical research. In Germany, all human cloning is forbidden by law. There are also efforts now at the United Nations and other international organizations to pass a world-wide ban on human cloning – with many of the same disagreements internationally as there are nationally about what kind of ban to pass.

ENDNOTES

1. Since the birth of Dolly, several volumes on the history and significance of cloning have been published, including Kolata, G., Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead, New York: Morrow and Company, 1998, and National Bioethics Advisory Commission [NBAC], Cloning Human Beings, Bethesda, MD: Government Printing Office, 1997. In addition, several valuable anthologies have been edited, including Kristol, W., and E. Cohen , The Future is Now, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002, and Nussbaum, M., and C.R. Sunstein, Clones and Clones, New York: Norton, 1998. Back to Text
   
2. See Spemann, H., Embryonic Development and Induction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1938). As quoted in Kolata, G., Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead (New York: Morrow and Company, 1998), p. 61. Back to Text
   
3. Briggs, R., and T. J. King, "Transplantation of living nuclei from blastula cells into enucleated frog's eggs," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 38: 455-463, 1952. Back to Text
   
4. Gurdon, J. B., "The developmental capacity of nuclei taken from intestinal epithelium cells of feeding tadpoles," Journal of Embryology and Experimental Morphology 10, 622-640, 1962. Back to Text
   
5. A fact also noted by NBAC in Cloning Human Beings, p. 18. Back to Text
   
6. Regalado, A., "Only Nine Lives for Kitty? Not if She Is Cloned," Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2002, p. B1. Kluger, J., "Here Kitty Kitty!" Time, February 17, 2002. Back to Text
   
7. Huxley, Aldous., Brave New World (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), p. 6-7. Originally published by Harper & Brothers, 1932. Back to Text
   
8. Lederberg, J., "Experimental Genetics and Human Evolution," The American Naturalist, September-October 1966, Vol. 100, No. 915, pp. 527. Back to Text
   
9. Ibid, p. 531, 527, 528. Back to Top
   
10. Ibid, p. 528, 529, 531. Back to Top
    
11. Ramsey, P., Fabricated Man: The Ethics of Genetic Control (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 89. Back to Text
    
12. Ibid, p. 95. Back to Text
    
13. Watson, J., "Moving Toward the Clonal Man," The Atlantic Monthly, May 1971, p. 51. (This article is a slightly modified version of Watson's congressional testimony.) Back to Text
    
14. Ibid, p. 51, 53. Back to Text
    
15. Proceedings before the Committee on Science and Astronautics, U. S. House of Representatives, Ninety-Second Congress, January 26, 27, and 28, 1971, p. 344. Back to Text
    
16. Gaylin, W., "The Frankenstein Myth Becomes a Reality-We Have the Awful Knowledge to Make Exact Copies of Human Beings," The New York Times Magazine, March 5, 1972, p. 12ff. Back to Text
    
17. Kass, L., "Making Babies-the New Biology and the 'Old' Morality," The Public Interest, Winter 1972, Number 26, p. 23. Back to Text
    
18. Fletcher, J., The Ethics of Genetic Control: Ending Reproductive Roulette (New York: Anchor Books, 1974), p. 154. Back to Text
    
19. Stent, G., "Molecular Biology and Metaphysics," Nature, Vol. 248, No. 5451, April 26, 1974, p. 781. As quoted in Kolata op. cit., p. 92. Back to Text
    
20. Rorvik, D. M., In His Image: The Cloning of a Man (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1978). Back to Text
    
21. As quoted in Kolata, op. cit., p. 103. Back to Text
    
22. Interview by C. P. Anderson, "In His Own Words: Nobel Laureate James Watson Calls Report of Cloning People 'Science Fiction Silliness,'" People, April 17, 1978, pp. 93-95. As quoted in Kolata, op. cit., p. 104. Back to Text
    
23. President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, Splicing Life: A Report on the Social and Ethical Issues of Genetic Engineering with Human Beings, November 1982. Back to Text
    
24. National Institutes of Health, Ad Hoc Group of Consultants to the Advisory Committee to the Director, Report of the Human Embryo Research Panel, September 1994, p. 28. Back to Text
    
25. Hearing before the Subcommittee on Public Health and Safety of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, United States Senate, March 12, 1997. p. 22. Back to Text
    
26. See, for example, Kass, L., "The Wisdom of Repugnance," The New Republic, June 2, 1997, pp. 17-26, and "Preventing a Brave New World, The New Republic, May 21, 2001, pp. 30-39. Back to Text
    
27. Robertson, J.A., "A Ban on Cloning and Cloning Research Is Unjustified," testimony before the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, March 14, 1997. Macklin, R., testimony before NBAC, March 14, 1997. Back to Text
    
28. NBAC, Cloning Human Beings, 1997, pp. ii-iii. Back to Text
    
29. Ibid, p. iii. Back to Text
    
30. Congressional Record, February 9, 1998, pp. S513-514. Back to Text
    
31. Jaenisch, R., and I. Wilmut, "Don't clone humans!" Science 291: 5513, March 30, 2001. Back to Text
    
32. Saad, L. "Cloning Humans Is a Turn-Off to Most Americans" Gallup Poll Analyses, May 16, 2002. Back to Text