Forty House Republicans on Monday called on President Trump to replace the current head of the National Institutes of Health with someone who will take a stronger position against stem cell research and a form of cloning.
Obama-era appointee Dr. Francis Collins is currently running the NIH, which funds medical research. Though he has been open about his Christian faith, the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Trump that “the stances that Dr. Collins has taken in the past, regarding embryonic stem cell research and human cloning, are not life-affirming and directly conflict with the pro-life direction of the new presidency.” “It is because of this troubling paradox that we ask you to re-consider his leadership role at NIH,” they wrote.
Collins was nominated by President Obama in 2009, and was sworn in to his role unanimously. He has generally received support from Republican lawmakers, and is known for leading the Human Genome Project, which mapped human DNA.
House Republicans opposed to Collins cited an interview he had with the science journal Nature, in which he said that funding for a human embryonic stem cell registry was a priority for him. They said he fought against an attempt to increase taxpayer funding of embryonic stem cell research, and cited a PBS interview in 2006 in which he said he supported the creation of cloned human embryos.
The letter also denounced a Discovery interview in 2007 in which he said there are hundreds of thousands of those embryos frozen in vitro fertilization clinics that might be used in some way.
“And it is absolutely unrealistic to imagine that anything will happen to those other than they’re eventually getting discarded,” he said then. “So as much as I think human embryos deserve moral status, it is hard to see why it’s more ethical to throw them away than to take some that are destined for discarding and do something that might help somebody.”
In the 2006 PBS interview, Collins said that he supported somatic cell nuclear transfer, a type of cloning in which the nucleus of an egg is replaced by the nucleus of another type of cell.
“Now that is very different in my mind, morally, than the union of sperm and egg,” Collins said. “We do not in nature see somatic cell nuclear transfer occurring. This is a purely manmade event. And yet somehow we have attached to the product of that kind of activity the same moral status as the union of sperm and egg. I don’t know quite how we got there.”
In a interview with Scientific American, Collins said that he was “intensely uncomfortable with abortion as a solution to anything” and does not “perceive a precise moment at which life begins other than the moment of conception.” He also said, however, that he “does not advocate changing the law.”
