News Tip: Duke Ethicists Differ on Cloning Breakthrough

Thursday's announcement that South Korean scientists had cloned human embryos for stem-cell research raises troubling questions about the fundamental ethical boundaries of human research, says Duke University Divinity School professor Amy Laura Hall.

"To count the cost of such research requires us to take several difficult steps away from the names and faces and plights of those who might benefit from therapeutic cloning," says Hall, an assistant professor of theological ethics and an expert in bioethics. "We must consider the unquantifiable toll this research takes on our desire to be a just nation."

But Robert Cook-Deegan, director of the Center for Genome Ethics, Law, and Policy at Duke's Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, says he does not find the research nearly as troubling.

"We simply do not know whether a human being might have resulted from the experiments if they had been implanted in a woman," says Cook-Deegan, who until July 2002 directed the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellowship program at the Institute of Medicine (IOM), National Academy of Sciences. "The crucial act would have been implantation. This experiment does bring that technical possibility one step closer, and we have been advancing step by step since Dolly. But the crucial step would be implantation, and that is as unethical today as it would have been with the human embryo stem cell lines six years ago."

Brigid Hogan, Ph.D., chair of the Cell Biology Department at Duke University, believes that while the new procedures used by the Korean group are sufficient to allow some of the cloned embryos to develop to the blastocyte stage necessary for stem cell line production, there is no evidence at all that the technical innovations would increase the chance of success for reproductive cloning.

At issue is the "reprogramming" of the genetic material transferred from the donor cell into the egg. Although the Korean group allowed the donor nucleus to remain in the egg some time before activating the process of embryo development, there is no reason to believe this was sufficient to completely reprogram the DNA, Hogan says. This would require closing down the activity of genes making "adult proteins" and switch them to making "embryonic proteins."

"One cannot make the leap that this reprogramming is completely error free and accurate enough to program the production of a normal human baby," Hogan says. "To use these embryos in any attempt to make a baby would be completely unethical and full of grave risk and harm to both mother and potential child."

Cook-Deegan agrees. "They do not have definitive proof that if they implanted the blastocysts they used to create the cell line that it would produce a human being, but it is possible that if someone did implant the blastocysts, a baby would result, and it would be a human clone (except for the mitochondria) of the nucleus donor.

"It is not ethical to try to do that because there is no information that the technique would produce a normal baby, and considerable evidence that it might cause problems in any resulting baby (based on analogous animal experiments). The point here is that the barriers to producing a human baby are primarily ethical. They may also be technical, but we don't know, and we should not find out, because no one should do that experiment. It would be unethical."

Hall maintains that any such experimentation weakens the value of human life. "The practice of inciting a human embryo merely in order to destroy it for our own purposes threatens further to erode our sense that a human person is not simply a tool," says Hall, who is researching the rise in the last century of the medically enhanced child and the scientifically calibrated family.

"With this news from South Korea, we have the chance to ask anew whether we will accept the deplorable act of treating people as mere things. To draw a hard line here might allow us to affirm fundamentally that all human life is precious and worthy of protection."

Hall adds: "In order to decide whether to cheer this scientific breakthrough, we must ask whether ethical boundaries have been broken."

Cook-Deegan says he does not believe that this experiment "treats human beings as means and not ends. Moreover, I would not agree even with a weaker claim that it is treating embryos without respect. It is treating human cells as a cell line."

Cook-Deegan can be reached for additional comment at (919) 668-0793 or (919) 613-0911 (home) or by email at bob.cd@duke.edu.

Hall can be reached at (919) 660-3403 or by email at ahall@div.duke.edu.

Hogan can be reached at (919) 684-8085 or by email at b.Hogan@cellbio.duke.edu.

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