WHEN THE President’s Council on Bioethics released its report on cloning last Thursday morning, in a gilded meeting room at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington, Sean Tipton made himself available to reporters in a hallway outside. But he wasn’t sure whether he should be upset. “Let’s be clear about what this means,” he said. Tipton is a board member and spokesman for the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, the Washington lobbying arm of the biotechnology industry, which of course strongly favors cloning. The council’s report does not favor cloning, however, or doesn’t seem to, anyway. The council called for a permanent ban on cloning intended to produce children. By a vote of ten to seven, it recommended a four-year moratorium on cloning embryos for medical research. Somebody had leaked a summary of the report to the New York Times, which in that morning’s editions had announced, ex cathedra, that the report “was a blow to scientists and advocates for patients, who view research cloning as a promising avenue for treatments and cures.” This is why Sean Tipton seemed to be upset at first. “A moratorium is a de facto ban, and there are millions of people with disease and disability who have not had a voice in this process,” he said. But he didn’t stay upset for long. He kept talking, and pretty soon his tone had brightened considerably. Actually, he said, when you look at it closely, a majority of council members had specifically rejected an outright ban on research cloning. And President Bush, who appointed them, favors such a research ban. “I was one of those, back in January when the council was put together, who thought it was a stacked deck,” said Tipton. “I thought they’d just rubber-stamp the president’s position, call for a total ban on all cloning, and go home. “Clearly that hasn’t happened. Clearly some things have changed. Our arguments are just too strong.” He gave a half-smile. “Really, when you think about it, you’d have to say this is a clear rejection of the president’s position, by the president’s own council.” Is he right? The White House claimed to be pleased with the report, and advocates for a total cloning ban claimed to be pleased, too. But it is the biotech industry, as Tipton realized, that truly has reason to be relieved. In Washington the political debate about cloning is stalled. Last month, the Senate declined to vote on either of two cloning bills–one that would fund research cloning, another that would ban all cloning outright. The momentum for a ban on research cloning, which seemed to be at hand as recently as this spring, has quickly dissipated, owing largely to a skilled lobbying campaign from the biotech industry and its allies in the “patient advocate community.” And the council’s ten-to-seven endorsement of a moratorium seems unlikely to revive the issue. The council is an implausible creature, at least by the standards of Washington advisory commissions. Chaired by Leon Kass, the well-known bioethicist from the University of Chicago, it is top heavy with legal scholars, professional philosophers, and research scientists–intellectuals mostly unused to the grimy practicalities of political sausage-making and seldom required to make concrete proposals for public policy. The council’s charge was grander than policy-making. It was “to undertake fundamental inquiry into the human and moral significance of developments in biomedical and behavioral science and technology.” Cloning is just the most prominent and immediate example of these developments. Pursuing its inquiry, the council has over the last seven months held long, discursive public sessions in hotel ballrooms, listening to briefings from scientists and papers from ethicists, and chewing over such topics as the difference between “motive” and “intent.” This is politics as conceived by Aristotle rather than Trent Lott. In his public comments, Kass never fails to call attention to the panel’s detachment from the Washington whirl, and at Thursday’s session he gently chided the press for its concentration on the quotidian. “Since coming to Washington,” he said, “I’ve learned that people always want to know the bottom line–are you for it or are you against it?” The council, however, had larger concerns. “This is an ethics council,” he said, with a trace of exasperation. “We did not just ask, Will it work? Or, Is it safe? We asked, Is it good, is it right, is it noble, just, wise, and prudent? We do not begin our discussion with the technique of cloning itself. We discuss it on the plane of the human goods that might be threatened by it.” Well, okay. But are you for it or against it? The answer, as you might expect, is complicated, and to find it one must go to the report–145 pages not counting glossary, index, bibliography, and several highly revealing “personal statements” submitted by individual council members. It is a dazzling document, perhaps the most comprehensive and lucid primer ever produced on any issue of public policy, with long chapters on the science and history of cloning and the philosophical roots of the present disagreements. It is also, as far as I know, the only report ever issued by an organ of the federal government that has a section entitled “The Goodness of Existence.” This section falls in the report’s most unequivocal chapter, a stirring and careful repudiation of the case for cloning with the intention of producing children. This conclusion was endorsed unanimously, by all seventeen of the council’s participating members. And it is useful to have the arguments against reproductive cloning so readily accessible, and presented so well. But the fact–the bottom line, if you’ll excuse the expression–is that no person in a position of authority advocates reproductive cloning. This is true even of the Senate, which otherwise dithers when the subject of cloning is raised. What trips up the Senate is also what trips up the council–not reproductive cloning but research cloning, the production of human embryos so their cells can be used in medical experiments. Here the council’s unanimity breaks down. As the newspapers reported, seven of the members believed that research cloning should immediately proceed, with full government funding under a system of federal regulation. Ten voted instead to recommend the four-year moratorium. But within these voting blocs are subsets and sub-subsets, whose delicately nuanced positions are fully ventilated in the report and, because they carry implications for the larger cloning debate, are worth a brief summary. The council members may not know much about making sausage, but they can slice it very fine. Among the seven advocates of research cloning, four are research scientists with few qualms about the procedure. “In the spirit of these times,” writes one, “I say, ‘Let’s roll.'” For them, the embryo is a mere “clump of cells,” and there is a bracing, even admirable, clarity and vigor to their view. The other three research supporters are professors of the liberal arts. They are bent double under the weight of their qualms. They are torn. They have “serious moral concerns,” because they are uncertain what moral status to assign to the cloned human embryo. The view that the embryo is a “mere clump of cells,” they write, is gravely unsubtle. It “greatly underestimates the moral seriousness of the question of whether to proceed with research on nascent human life. And it greatly mischaracterizes the meaning of potentiality.” Moreover, it ignores “the profound mystery of the origins of human life.” They therefore devote several thousand words, each of them anguished, to this mystery, this meaning of potentiality, and to this moral seriousness, before endorsing the destruction of this nascent human life. No wonder intellectuals hate the bottom line! It turns out the bottom line is the same for them as for those who hold the unsubtle view. The result is the same whether the professors are anguished or not. The embryo will be created, used for parts, and then discarded. Fortunately, the
professors have the consolations of poetry. “In removing the embryo, through research, from the circle of life,” wrote one in his personal statement, “we cannot remove it from the circle of human indebtedness.” Of course, it’s still dead. The ten pro-moratorium members are divided, too, and it is in this division that the biotech industry will find its unexpected good news. Seven of this ten oppose cloning even for research purposes, because of the moral status they assign to an embryo, or because they believe creating an embryo for the sake of destroying it crosses a crucial moral line. These seven make clear that their opposition, rooted in absolute principle, is unchangeable. They favor a ban, but they endorse a moratorium, they admit, as an intermediate step only, to encourage a “robust national debate” in hopes of building an anti-cloning consensus in the public at large, before a comprehensive ban on all cloning might plausibly be enacted. The three other moratorium advocates, however, hold no such unalterable views. They oppose a ban. Their concerns have to do with how a regulatory regime would work, and whether the rights of patients and egg donors can be sufficiently protected. A four-year moratorium would allow these questions to be resolved. After which, they suggest in their written statements, research cloning could proceed without their objection. The ten-to-seven endorsement for a moratorium is thus misleading. In fact, a majority of the council members, after months of reflection and research, have found no overriding ethical reason to oppose research cloning, so long as it operates with careful regulatory oversight. Splendid news for cloning advocates, bad news for their opponents–and an outcome unforeseen back in January, when the council was allegedly stacked to endorse the president’s call for a comprehensive ban. At the session Thursday morning, a reporter asked Kass whether any council members had changed their views during deliberations. “It’s been a roller coaster of a conversation,” he said. “I suppose there has been some movement in some places–certainly movement toward recognizing the power of other points of view. What this tells us is that the debate should go forward.” In the hallway outside the meeting room, I asked Sean Tipton the same question. “If there’s been any movement, it’s been in our direction,” he said. “In a way, you could expect that. The more these issues are debated, the more people tend to agree that this research should go ahead. This could have been a lot worse, believe me. More debate is fine.” Andrew Ferguson is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a columnist for Bloomberg News.
