Steve Quayle News Alerts

November 1, 1999

It was one of thousands of letters bearing the president's signature and only contained three paragraphs of type on that classic, understated White House stationery. The cloned sheep, stirred up an unavoidable ethical debate regarding cloning.

Yet, unlike the countless messages of thanks and congratulations that make up much of the president's correspondence, this was one of those rare letters that could affect history.

"Dear Dr. [Harold] Shapiro," Clinton greeted the chairman of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, "This week's report [November 1998] of the creation of an embryonic stem cell that is part human and part cow raises the most serious of ethical, medical and legal concerns. I am deeply troubled by this news of experiments involving the mingling of human and non-human species."

Clinton is not alone. Lawmakers in the Capitol and state houses across the U. S. are struggling to get a handle on the complex scientific advances that have occurred in recent years. Some sound like life-saving miracles, while others raise fears of mad scientists on the loose.

Many of these advancements, from cloning to stem-cell research, in-vitro fertilization, and bacteriology, often find their proponents accused of "playing God." And practitioners of a growing field of philosophical science known as bioethics are the ones called upon to act as referees in the bouts between religion and science.

"This is something you almost always find with new technologies, that talk about playing God often comes out. But that's often a visceral response," said David Magnus, the respected and outspoken director of graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.

Rhesus monkeys, born from cloned embryos, huddle together at an Oregon primate research center.

Magnus was recently called upon to render an opinion on the work of a headline-making scientist some have accused of "playing God," Dr. Craig Venter of the Institute for Genomic Research in Baltimore.

Venter's team was nearing the brink of developing a species of life never before seen on Earth; an artificial bacteria that would be stitched together from the 300 genes thought to be the minimal number needed to sustain a common bacteria found in the human genital tract.

But the researcher voluntarily halted his work and asked Magnus' team to begin a debate on the ethicality of such an endeavor.

"We have not decided to go ahead and do the experiment yet," Venter told reporters at a meeting of scientists in January. "We want to make sure the positive implications outweigh the negative ones."

Magnus expects to publish his findings in an upcoming edition of the journal. He said the theologians who researched Venter's work did not find offense with his "playing God."

"In fact, what they concluded was that whenever you hear people talk about playing God, that should be the start of the conversation instead of the end of it, which it too often is," he said. Yet, Magnus and some of the theologians on his team did see problems with science trying to reduce life to nothing but a DNA code that could be mastered.

"What we're very concerned about, is when the public announcement comes out, the media's going to say that this proves that life is just DNA. This shows there's no soul or something like that. And that would be a serious mistake," he said.

Yet, even discoveries with the potential to do great good to mankind raise ethical dilemmas.

"Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences cartilage samples grown as part of Freed's earlier research with Bioreactor and aboard Mir.

For example, MIT and NASA recently teamed up to develop heart tissue that could be grown outside of the body and could even be made to start beating like a natural heart. (NASA was involved because the tissue grew only in the absence of gravity; MIT replicated their work with a special bioreactor back on Earth.)

A logical leap to make from that technology would be that someday in the future, scientists could develop a manmade heart that could last longer than the one a human is born with.

Unlike Venter, Lisa Freed, an MIT scientist who worked on the experiments, didn't embrace a bioethics debate when it came to her work. When asked in an e-mail interview what she thought about a potential "super heart," she responded: "This is not one of our research goals, and I have no comment." Responding to a subsequent question about whether she had any ethical qualms about working on technology that may one day lead to a "super heart," this time she put her answer in bold face: "Again, no comment."

Magnus said the main ethical problem with possible enhanced organs such as these, after basic safety concerns, is the issue of distributive justice.

"I do worry a little bit that we're heading toward a future where the upper segment of society is going to live to be 150," he said, while "at the same time impoverished people have an average lifespan of 50."

The headlines and controversy surrounding issues of cloning, genetic engineering and other breakthroughs illustrate the importance of legislative oversight, Magnus said. As a result, bioethicists are increasingly called upon to render opinions to legislative bodies, because, in general, politicians' knowledge of scientific breakthroughs is "terrible."

"Florida came within an eyelash of passing an anti-cloning law that would have made it illegal to actually clone cells, which would have just basically banned all biology in the state of Florida," he said. "There are some terrible, terrible laws, especially at the state level."

Trinity International University bioethics professor C. Ben Mitchell, who lobbied in August before an Illinois Senate committee dealing with cloning, vividly described the duality of the debate.

He told the committee that, "Most of the rationales which have been offered to support human cloning can be dismissed out of hand as unethical. The idea that someone should be allowed to clone another person because they thought they were somehow stellar figures of whom the world could not do without, reflects a very ugly narcissism." And added that the same technology that could clone a whole team of Michael Jordans could also produce a "pride" of Hitlers.
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