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June 13, 2002

Cloning Confusion

Will ethics keep us from technological and medical advances?

By Joe Celko

Remember the old days, when we were afraid of giant computers taking over the world? Well, things have changed and today's "pop dread" is biotech — especially "red biotech" or medical biotechnology. Recently, President Bush urged the U.S. Senate to approve legislation for a total ban on human cloning.

In the 18th century, the big debate was over inoculation against smallpox. The debate lasted from the 1730s through the mid-1770s, when it was made legal. Voltaire in his "Letters from the English Nation" in 1734 and others in France pleaded for the introduction of experimental inoculation. Their argument was simple; inoculation would save lives, reduce human suffering, and save the survivors from smallpox scars.

Cloning Fit for a King

The French Crown repeatedly consulted the faculties of medicine and theology at the University of Paris. Both continued to recommend a ban on the practice of inoculation. The faculty of medicine argued that the Hippocratic oath begins with "First, do no harm," and inoculation was the deliberate infecting of someone with a disease. The faculty of theology saw inoculation as an attempt by human beings to play God by interfering with the divine order of the universe instead of letting people die as nature ran its course.

In the end, King Louis XV died of smallpox, the court panicked, and the royal council legalized inoculation in France.

Today, King Louis, oops, I mean President Bush said anything less than a total ban would be "unethical" even though human cloning research could provide cures for diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer's, and paralysis.

Bush said, "Others have announced plans to produce cloned children, despite the fact that laboratory cloning of lab animals has led to spontaneous abortion and terrible, terrible abnormalities."

Is Cloning the Cure?

I hate to tell him that spontaneous abortions and abnormalities occur when you make kids the old-fashioned way. And so do "clones." You would think that the father of twin daughters would remember that fact. Or perhaps we should hunt down the parents of identical twins and try them under House of Representatives Bill HR-1644, the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001, which states, "It shall be unlawful for any person or entity, public or private, in or affecting interstate commerce:

to perform or attempt to perform human cloning;
to participate in an attempt to perform human cloning; or
to ship or receive the product of human cloning for any purpose."

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Penalties for doing so are imprisonment for up to 10 years and, if any "pecuniary gain" is a result, a civil penalty of not less that $1,000,000. This phrase means that when another country has a cure for a disease based on human cloning research, you'll be declared a criminal for saving your own life or that of a loved one. There's a strong legal precedence for this position as many Americans die every year because they can't get drugs that the FDA hasn't approved.

Anti-biotech groups committed more than a dozen acts of vandalism against public and private research facilities in 2000 alone. All the attacks were done "in the name of the people" or other cliches used by radical minority groups. I almost miss being afraid of computers after all this current biotech hysteria.

Joe Celko [71062.1056@compuserve.com] works in the Professional Services Division at Data Junction Corp. and is the author of Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1999).